“a heartfelt insight…informed and impassioned….But it’s his ability to make sense of this album’s cocktail of crushed optimism and acrimonious revolt that makes this volume so impressive.” ―Stevie Chick, Mojo
“Miles Marshall Lewis’s absolutely essential 33 1/3 on Riot tells a good part of the story-the disillusioned national mood after the Death of the Sixties, Sly’s post-Woodstock ambivalence towards the fame he once craved, and his sonic turn towards introversion and quietude that manifested in muffled vocals and a restrained drum machine in place of Greg Errico’s thunderous backbeat.” ―Nate Patrin, Pitchfork
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“Don’t hate the black, don’t hate the white. If you get bitten, just hate the bite,” Sly Stone advised America in 1968. You can make it if you try, different strokes for different folks, and you don’t have to die before you live are a mere few of the optimistic messages spread in songs by Sly and the Family Stone during the heady days of the Summer of Love and Woodstock. Then times…changed. By the 1971 release of the stylishly mournful masterpiece There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the man who once sang of hot fun in the summertime warned, “Watch out ’cause the summer gets cold / When today gets too old.” Riot laid a sonic backdrop for the nationwide cultural and political disintegration of 1960s fallout, as well as the personal dissolution of disillusioned idealist Sly Stone.
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