Just a year shy of a quarter of a century ago, Sly Stone, the funk poet steeped in the stew of blues, race, and riot, produced the second and gentlest of his blithe singles. Wars rocked the cities and the consciousness of his listeners, Richard Nixon had just been elected president, and voices for change were regularly shot down. But Stone took a stand against hate:
Makes no difference what group I’m in . . .
When I first heard the song, I thought that Speech was joining Sly in a plea for harmony, a call for black unity. Until the last verse:
Acting like a nigga and get stomped by an African!
While the negative aspects of some of this music have unquestionably been distorted and exploited by the white mainstream media, those negative aspects had to be there in the music to be exploited. The utopianism and faith that fueled black music’s force for decades was now pretty much gone in a very large section of the music. In other words, one of the most distinctive and valuable cultural ties that existed in America suddenly vaporized and blew away in an ominous wind. Left in its wake was a debilitating, polarizing debate. Time and time again, public, governmental, and corporate pressure has pushed these performers into corners, where their rhetoric only becomes more reckless.
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There was of course a vibrant and growing political consciousness: any soul music created after Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” had to reflect this, and the times produced stuff like Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly sound track, latter-day Motown works like Edwin Starr’s “War,” and the group War’s “The World Is a Ghetto.” Among the pop songs of the day–on both the white and black charts–the zeitgeist was ruled by the O’Jays’ “Love Train.” To the extent that it appears, this era’s sharpest political comment was social: it took the form of essays on the seven deadly sins (“For the Love of Money”) and relatively vague commentary (“[For God’s Sake] Give More Power to the People”).
