Abridged elegy for Sly Stone

A poet.

The decomposing lullabies on Sly’s There’s a Riot Going On (1971) accomplish what I wish mumble rap would, if it could dismantle its nightclub ego; they stall and extend the resonance of an illegible confession of unconditional love. My backlash against cultural necromancy is not a backlash against grieving, but a way of encouraging a collective retreat from the hell-scape where grieving and grave-robbing are conflated and trade places. I don’t want to flaunt his name like a banner for shallow dejection or one of many opportunities to virtue signal on a horrific news day where one might mistake what she’s informed about for her own lived experience. I am not somewhere off the coast of Israel being taken into custody by the IOF, I am not downtown facing off against ICE, and my father didn’t die, not this time.

What struck me about the recent documentary on Sly, is how well it erased the present and trapped him in 1960s and ‘70s as a statue and symbol, finally, of failure to ride gimmicks and stunts into the wax museum sunset. Instead he rode around Crenshaw in an RV and weird stalker paparazzi interviewed him about his publishing rights and rehab. Sly was killed prematurely in his waking life, by his own obscene crossover popularity, which made him famous too young and asked him to repeat himself or reinvent himself as if some kind of machine pumping out relatable black psychedelia. He was goofy and uncooperative until the handlers gave up and went looking elsewhere. He quivers time, another minute at least, on my favorite song of his and my favorite from …Riot… take your time/but you’ve got to have a limit.

His smile possessed this haunting quality, both taut and elastic, and during interviews he sometimes flashed it in disbelief at a dense or prying line of questions, sometimes questions almost as blunt as a variation of, why did you mess it all up getting high. By the end of his life, relatively reclusive, to the extent that he doesn’t appear in the attempted biopic as documentary, dodges the groupies who follow him around Los Angeles, and turns his concerts into broken sermons and oral histories, I imagine he might have been grateful for the relative brevity of his reign over popular music.

We mess it all up for the astral plane’s cameo on earth, expecting miracles to last forever, dreading their shadows so well they overpower the light. And as for the stories of Sly deleting and re-recording albums, I have at least one of those rumors on the record from the first time I met Arthur Jafa, at Fred Moten’s house when he lived in LA. I recorded them discussing music and AJ brought up Sly’s tendency to lock himself in Electric Lady Studios and make albums he’d never release, often even deleting them. Heartbreaking, the unconditional love never revoked, just never promising what form it might take. Absence just as honorable a way to express devotion as excessive presence is. Excessive presence leaves no traces. And as for my backlash against necromancy, my fear of eating the dead; I hope his vault is left alone, no hologram tours of the phantom albums, no solo art shows about him and his family breaking and mending, just making due with the haunted melodies he already gave the world, and the quiet exit from the stage so few get by with once they’re in the center of everything beautiful. Try and stand there with him.