Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Two of 1971’s most iconic soul albums fit together as a question and an answer. After Marvin Gaye released his thought-provoking opus What’s Going On in May of that year, Sly & The Family Stone’s fifth album was released in November with a title that was meant as a reply to Gaye’s album: There’s a Riot Goin’ On. But for most of the two years that Sly Stone labored on the follow-up to 1969’s Stand! he had a different working title in mind, Africa Talks to You. And even after the title change, the eight-minute song “Africa Talks to You (‘The Asphalt Jungle’)” remained the centerpiece of the album.
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Most of The Family Stone’s original lineup remained in the band until 1975, but Sly Stone recorded much of There’s a Riot Goin’ On by himself in his Bel Air mansion, experimenting with an early drum machine, the Maestro Rhythm King MRK-2. Keyboardist and “fifth Beatle” Billy Preston is the only musician besides Stone on “Africa Talks to You,” although their friendship was short-lived. Preston caught his fiancée, model and actress Kathy Silva, in bed with Stone, and Stone would marry Silva onstage at Madison Square Garden in 1974.
Stand! had made Sly & The Family Stone one of the most popular bands in America, a multiracial group with a progressive sound and an inspiring message. With There’s a Riot Goin’ On, however, Stone presented a darker vision that was as much a reaction to his own past work as Marvin Gaye’s latest. In his 2023 autobiography Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), Stone wrote, “If I kept the original name of the album, the title track would have been ‘Africa Talks to You (The Asphalt Jungle),’ a nearly nine-minute look at (black) life in America. The chorus was the opposite of ‘Stand!’: ‘Timber! All fall down!’”
On the album, “Africa Talks to You” was followed by a track that consisted of four seconds of silence that was titled “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.” In 1997 Stone told Jonathan Dakss, who curated a Sly & The Family Stone website, that the song was silent because “I felt there should be no riots.”
In 1994, British trip hop pioneers Massive Attack released the single “Sly,” which sampled the Maestro Rhythm King beat from “Africa Talks to You.”
Three more essential Sly & The Family Stone deep cuts:
“Trip to Your Heart”
Sly & The Family Stone’s 1967 debut A Whole New Thing made little commercial impact at the time, but “Trip to Your Heart” was famously sampled on LL Cool J’s 1991 hit “Mama Said Knock You Out.”
“Love City”
The Family Stone bassist Larry Graham’s uniquely percussive style was hugely influential on other bass guitarists, and “Love City” from 1968’s Life features an early example of Graham’s legendary slap bass sound.
“You Can Make It If You Try”
The anthemic “You Can Make It If You Try” from Stand! was part of The Family Stone’s legendary 3:30 a.m. set on the second night of Woodstock.
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