Get the latest gossip

Sly & the Family Stone’s 10 Best Songs (Staff Picks)

Sly and the Family Stone's 10 best songs, including "Everyday People," "Family Affair" and "I Want to Take You Higher."

With the band, Sly Stone both scaled the greatest heights of Flower Power utopianism and plumbed the lowest depths of Nixon-era disillusionment, with incisive lyrics, brilliant hooks and grooves that could be as lock-step tight or as meanderingly loose as the song called for. Though the band largely fell into disarray in the mid-’70s, and neither the Family Stone or its leader ever were able to quite recapture their peak prominence, the music lived on through subsequent generations — and could be heard sampled and recycled on major hits by Janet Jackson, LL Cool J, Cypress Hill, the Beastie Boys and countless other later acts. For those rare times in life when there’s no riot goin’ on and nothing immediately pressing to take a stand over, there can simply be “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” Sly & the Family Stone’s most classic-sounding pop song — tone down a couple of those vocal ad libs and it could’ve easily been a Nat King Cole composition — remains an essential seasonal standard for its sun-tanned horns, nostalgic lyrics and impossibly breezy sway, one of the most topical bands of its era proving it could be be just as potent blissing out in the shade for two and a half minutes.

Get the Android app