Who is popular today?

The genre-bending musician has an astonishing story to tell – but wrestling it into a conventional narrative doesn’t quite workIn 1964, 21-year-old Sylvester Stewart of Vallejo, California talked his way into a job at San Francisco’s KSOL radio and adopted the hipster alias Sly Stone. “Sly was strategic, slick,” he explains in his peculiar memoir. “Stone was solid.” You would have to say that most of his life has been neither sly nor stone.For a couple of years at the end of the 1960s, Sly and the Family Stone were the world’s most transcendentally exciting band: black and white, male and female, a show-don’t-tell advertisement for the ecstasy of unity. Look up their 1968 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show and see Sly and his sister Rose shimmy like the future through the very white, very square audience. Yet within three years that dream was dead. Stone flew so high and crashed so hard that he became a living metaphor for thwarted hopes and foreclosed utopias. Continue reading...