The Undoing of a Great American Band

Live, he could bend time to his will like James Brown. His band Sly and the Family Stone—polyracial, polygendered, poly-freaking-phonic (you could never quite tell which voice was Sly’s, and he himself had several)—was a crucible of joy, a crucible of possibility, an experiment that took on the character of a proof: People could live together. America could work. Love and justice were real. For about a minute. “I can’t imagine my life without Sly Stone,” Cornel West says in the 2017 documentary On the Sly: In Search of the Family Stone. “Sly created a music that became a place where we could go to have a foretaste of that freedom, of that democratic experience. Even though we couldn’t live it on the ground.”