Sly Stone — The First Rap Superstar?
Cloaked in otherworldly, funky style, Sly Stone was a rap superstar before hip-hop even existed.
Photo illustration for Okayplayer.
It’s hard to “fight the power” and win, but 59 years ago, Sly Stone managed to walk away with the W. One of his greatest.
Facing label pressure to abandon his psychedelic sound in favor of a more commercial record that would make audiences — you know — dance to the music, Sly responded with an exercise in bold-faced sarcasm: dropping a song that instructed listeners to “dance to the music.” He called the track “Dance to the Music.” There’s a parallel universe where Clive Davis told him to “this ain’t it” and head back to the drawing board. Instead, the track became one of the biggest of Sly & the Family Stone’s career, and Sly crystallized himself as an artist’s artist for a generation. A white rock historian might’ve said the moment was metal. But I’ll say it was hip-hop. Very hip-hop. Before hip-hop even existed. And it was delivered by its most stylish forebearer. With his blend of flamboyant, idiosyncratic fashion, call-and-response songwriting, and his band’s funky bass lines, Sly Stone was hip-hop in all but name — a rap superstar decades before we knew what one was. The first one.
His act of defiance was as bold as his style. Years before Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5 were dripped out like disco space pirates, Sly Stone rocked glowing golden capes, gold chains, and fedoras Gandalf the Grey would’ve rocked on Soul Train. Before Young Thug wore a dress, Sly specialized in gender-fluid style; his bespectacled platforms kept him hovering as though the ground weren’t fit for his divine step. The silver lamé he wore at his own 2006 Grammys tribute looked like the flyest space fit that never made it to André 3000’s closet. Like 3 Stacks and Thugger after him, Sly understood fashion as self-contained theater. His ethereal threads were the opening act.
Sly Stone’s music itself was something like an opening salvo for trap music, too. And not in the early 2000s kind of way; more like the murky, bando-adjacent funk that began cooking up in the cauldrons of the Dungeon Family basement in the 1990s. As OutKast receded into group retirement, a young rapper named Meathead was still years away from translating his Southern formalist raps to the gurgling melodies he used to define the 2010s. That was before he was Future. Listening to Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, it feels like Sly Stone was Future before Future was Future. Like Future, Sly found strength in the comedown, wielding his weary croaks to evoke longing and emotional defeat. Before Future was “Codeine Crazy,” Sly Stone was “Just Like a Baby.” For that one, the lo-fi drums and faded guitar frame Sly Stone’s vocals in something foggy and narcotic. Fused with Sly’s wounded murmurs, the track feels like regret sandwiched between a couple of bad hangovers. The bars almost read like a text you shouldn’t send your ex: “Just like a baby, everything is new/Just like a baby, come to find out I'm a whole lot like you too.”
The soundscapes of There’s a Riot Goin’ On — some of the first to make prominent use of a drum machine (Sly called it his “funk box”) — reinforced the blueprint for a genre that technically only came into existence about 40 years later. Ditto for Sly & The Family Stone’s rhythmic songwriting structures. Before MC became known for the chief responsibility of “moving the crowd,” Sly & The Family Stone were maneuvering their words in short, staccato bursts that mimicked the start-stop spontaneity of the dance floor. For tracks like "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” or “Everyday People,” Sly and his crew delivered one-after-the-other performances mimicking the subtle electricity of a schoolyard cypher. Their chants could double as commands. Same for their political songs.
Years before Flavor Flav said “Motherf**k John Wayne,” Sly & The Family Stone were also using slappers to give a middle finger to the establishment. In a cosmic sense, it rarely gets more political than Stand!, a 1969 album with a title that doubles as a call to action against racism, apathy and disillusionment. Fueled by a distorted bassline and searing bars, tracks like “Don’t Call Me N****r, Whitey” deal with the mutual hostility that could make racism feel inescapable: “Well, I went down across the country/And I heard two voices ring/They were talkin' funky to each other/And neither other could change a thing.” The lyrics are interpretive, but if you listen closely, you can almost hear 2Pac shrug, “that’s just the way it is,” about 30 years later.
When Sly Stone wasn’t in resignation mode, he was living up to the Stand! album with its title track. It’s not as raging as “Fight the Power” or “Holla If Ya Hear Me,” but its force comes from plainly stated intention: “Stand/For the things you know are right/It's the truth that the truth makes them so uptight.” Sly swirled those elements together most potently on “Everyday People,” a theme song for the working man. Combined with slangy phrases like “different strokes for different folks,” it’s as infectious as it is unmistakably Black. Righteous and funky, Sly & The Family Stone’s fourth LP stitched the crew into the American consciousness for good. With lyricism that could be symbolic and literal — earnest or sarcastic — Sly Stone turned beliefs into spurts of graceful fury. And release.
In the years since the apex of Sly & The Family Stone, his records have been sampled over 800 times, with everyone from A Tribe Called Quest to Kendrick Lamar wielding fragments of his imagination. Collectively, his sounds are a sonic through line for a generation that emerged long after “Everyday People.” Now, we hear his sounds every day.
Sly Stone didn’t predict hip-hop. He didn’t create it, either. But before he picked up a microphone, no one had ever embodied it so completely. James Brown had the funk, the drip and the shouts, but not the flows. Jimi Hendrix had the mystique, the fashion, the melodies and politics, but not the bars. Gil Scot Heron had the proto-raps, but not the wardrobe. His contemporaries had some of the ingredients. But none had the whole recipe — a constellation of taste, technique, imagination, and belief. Something — someone — extraterrestrial, but unfailingly human; a superstar from the cloth of the everyday people. When Sly Stone hit the stage, nobody had to tell you to dance.
