“It is not casual music and its demands are not casual,” writes Marcus. Siifu’s album is an in-your-face expression of rage against white supremacist police murders and is a million miles from his 2018 album, Ensley, much like Riot represented a sea change from Sly & the Family Stone’s Stand!, their much-loved fourth album released in 1969.Īs celebrated cultural critic Greil Marcus wrote in his book Mystery Train – Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music: “With Riot, Sly gave his audience, particularly his white audience, exactly what they didn’t want.” Marcus goes on to describe the album as “music that traps what you feel when you are shoved back into the corners of loneliness, where you really have to think about dead flesh and cannot play around with the satisfaction of myth”. Durban rapper Raheem Kemet is just getting startedĮchoes of Riot could be detected strongly last year when the Los Angeles-based rapper Pink Siifu released a howling rage of an album titled Negro.And looking beyond Riot’s specific songs, the band’s music has been sampled by heavyweight rappers and crews that include NWA, Public Enemy, Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One, Missy Elliott, 2Pac, Dr Dre and Kendrick Lamar. Taking a look back at hip-hop history, he has a point.įrom a sampling perspective, the songs Runnin’ Away, You Caught Me Smilin’ and Family Affair have been repurposed on A Tribe Called Quest’s Description of a Fool, J Dilla’s Jay Dee 8 and Ghostface Killah’s Dogs of War. Sly Stone’s biographer, Jeff Kaliss, who published I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly Stone in 2008, argues that Riot, the shorthand for Stone’s album adopted by fans and critics, was “one of the most powerful and haunting albums to inspire the hip-hop movement”. Sly & the Family Stone’s There is a Riot Goin On, released in November 1971, is a work so powerful that we can still hear its echoes reverberating.
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