Sly & The Family Stone were a great utopian experiment in pop music. This was a band born out of the cultural chaos of the late-’60s that reflected that chaos back on the world and turned it into something positive. The Family Stone had black members and white members, men and women, everyone playing different roles. Rock ‘n’ roll and R&B had been traveling in different directions for a few years before the Family Stone came along — aided by radio formatting and media that seemed determined to separate white music from black music — but this band brought them back together, turning them into a wild stew where everything bled into everything else.
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