The Reemergence of Sly Stone
Vanity Fair has a great, in-depth piece on Sly Stone featuring the first interview with the man in a couple of decades. He’s playing the Montreaux Jazz Festival this year and a few other European dates before allegedly going into the studio to record his first new music in over 21 years.
Among the many great songs he wrote and recorded before his decline and eventual seclusion, I consider “Hot Fun in the Summertime” one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded — a deceptively complicated piece of music that combined doo-wop, funk, swing, jazz and classic pop music, and yeah, you’ve heard it, but listen to all the chord and stylistic changes in the song and it will blow your mind several times over. For a relatively smooth song, that’s saying something.
Read the whole thing here.
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“Hot Fun in the Summertime” is, indeed, a revelation of pop. Not that you asked, though, but I will say my personal favorite Sly and the Family Stone songs are …
1 – “Family Affair” … just because it’s astonishing to hear how coked-up Sly sounds
2 – “Stand” … yes, it’s been completely overplayed, but it always makes me smile, and its sentiment belongs in the “Instant Karma”/”Imagine” camp of never-out-of-style idealism.