Sly & the Family Stone

Perhaps no album chronicles the transition from 1960s idealism to '70s burnout better than this. The celebrative funk and collectivist anthems of early Stone releases had faded and were supplanted by the bleary malaise of canned drums, tape hiss and slurred vocals. "Spaced Cowboy" and "Time" are the sound of the revolution reaching the end of a very long binge. While it's a sad sentiment, it also made for some of the most compelling music of Stone's career. This 2007 reissue features three instrumentals as well as the addition of the four-second title track.

Despairing, courageous, and very hard to take, this is one of those rare albums whose whole actually does exceed the sum of its parts. Bleak yet sentient songs of experience like "Runnin' Away" and "Family Affair" lend emotional and aesthetic life to the music's dead spaces; bracing alterations of vocal register, garish stereo separations, growls and shrieks and murmurs, all the stuff that made Sly's greatest hits the toughest commercial experiments in rock and roll history, are dragged over nerve-wracking rhythms of enormous musical energy. The inspiration may be Sly's discovery that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow doesn't mean sh*t, but what's expressed is the bitterest ghetto pessimism. Inspirational Verse: "TIME they say is/The answer/But I don't believe it." Original title: Africa Talks to You. Length of title track: 0:00. (Grade - A+)