Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Sly & The Family Stone

This is a band who I've just recently become kind of obsessed with. I mean, I've appreciated them and considered myself a fan for a long time, but I just started digging deeper into their catalog and really beginning to "get" them in a way I never did before. And all I have to say is... this band is incredible. Listen to the bass, the drums, the horns, the way it all comes together to just become this crazy dance party with an intelligence behind the groove. Great stuff.

Here's one of my new favorites - "Life" performed on Ed McMahon. At first I found the horns kind of cheesy, but tell me that horn riff doesn't stick in your head and bring a smile to your face.



And my favorite = "Stand"



"There's a midget standing tall, and a giant beside him about to fall." That's one great lyric for my money.

3 comments:

jayguevara said...

Yeah, great band. Just about every funk/soul band worth its' salt does a version of "Sing A Simple Song"...

I think they're underappreciated in terms of the impact they've had on contemporary music. Some of my personal favorites include "Loose Booty" (sampled by the Beastie Boys) and "Everybody is a Star" (sampled by the Roots).

texplush said...

There's A Riot Going On, ya'll.

Eric said...

Weirdly, I had just put all of their albums back onto my ipod the day you posted this. Amazing band-- every part of their career (even the underrated early and ate parts) are worth exploring. I like Riot, though I think it's draggy (that's the point of course, but I think that Fresh, the next album is basically a better riff on the same idea). My favorite album though is still their Greatest Hits which is a couple of their early singles, five out of the six awesome songs from Stand! and then three non-album singles. It's perfectly sequenced too-- "I Wanna Take You Higher" just screams out to the be the opener and I find it genuinely disarming when it shows up in the middle of the actual Stand album.