Six Degrees of "There's a Riot Goin' On"

If there's a single word that sums up There's a Riot Goin' On, that word is disintegration. It wasn't just the Family Stone that was falling apart (although inter-band bickering and Sly's increasingly ruinous coke habit weren't exactly promoting togetherness). It was the whole country that was unraveling: the promise and optimism of the '60s were slowly feeling like a bitter canard, America still tangled in the throes of a neverending war and fighting a Civil Rights battle that wasn't yielding equality quite as quickly as it should have. Two short years earlier Sly had promised "You Can Make It If You Try," but that mantra now seemed about as sound and realistic as "When You Wish Upon a Star." Riot captures all of that — the feeling of despair, of exasperation, of still going through the motions of belief all the while wondering if your trust has been misplaced.

It's not just in the lyrics — which were increasingly piecemeal and allusive — it was in the sound. The record is uncomfortably arid, Sly's voice bone-brittle, loaded with cracks and fissures. He doesn't sing melodies as much as suggest them, croaking his way across the heavy-lidded "Just Like a Baby" and mimicking a wah-wah guitar midway through the rubbery funk of "Africa Talks to You." The whole band sounds as if they're coated in molasses: everything is slowed-down, groggy, barely in place. Instruments enter and leave with little rhyme or reason, all of the players lazily spattering various shades of black on a dingy canvas. Bass lines go slack, organs wheeze and dawdle, guitars scratch like fingernails on the inside of a coffin. A crazed, disembodied yodel floats along the ether of the positively unglued "Spaced Cowboy." The album's most telling track? "(You Caught Me) Smiling," the surprise in the title indicating what a rare occurrence smiling is. Riot, simply put, is a motherfucker, a milestone of popular music and a long, terrifying trip down the rabbit hole of busted dreams. Almost forty years later and there isn't a damn thing that sounds even remotely like it.

Critics are quick to praise Speakerboxx/The Love Below as OutKast's defining statement, but in truth their musical epiphany arrived three years earlier. Stankonia is a sprawling masterpiece, an album full of greasy, rotting funk, acrobatic vocals and deft, nimble rhymes. It seemed at times beamed in from another planet, weird laser-beam keyboards boring holes into broad, beefy bass lines and screwball vocal effects making its key players sound like ghosts and goblins. But what on the surface could easily pass for a simple party record gradually reveals itself to be brimming with anger and frustration. The album opens with Andre 3000 howling "Does everybody like the smell of gasoline? Burn, motherfucker, burn American dreams!" over an epileptic funk guitar; its volcanic, would-be party anthem is called "Bombs Over Baghdad" and is built around the chorus, "Don't pull that thing out unless you plan to bang/ And don't even bang unless you plan to hit something." Even the apology at the center of "Ms. Jackson" bears the acrid sting of resentment ("I apologized a trillion times!") OutKast match Sly's willingness to fiddle with the boundaries of funk, writing songs that are experimental and elastic, snide and sinister.

In Rainbows takes place in outer space, a weird netherworld where soul separates from body and floats helpless and untethered. If Riot was primarily concerned with the numbing effect that comes from failed social change, the sorrow on In Rainbows is chiefly existential. The music sounds odd, ghostly, post-mortem: strange ghostly synths float across "Nude," Thom Yorke's warning "Don't get any big ideas/ They're not gonna happen" practically an echo of the failure felt back in the early '70s. More than that, though, In Rainbows is the sound of a band going numb and floating off into the ether. The songs are just as formless as Riot's, but where Sly opted for a steadily mounting tension, Radiohead are all slow release, the realization that everything is suddenly out of your hands and all you can do is surrender. "I'm an animal," Yorke coos at the album's center, "I'm an animal trapped in your hot car." Tellingly, he doesn't paw at the window, tear up the backseat or try to escape. He just sits there, calmly, letting the sun overtake him.

Just as panicked and cloistered as Riot, Aeroplane demolishes folk the same way Sly dismantled R&B, scrubbing it down to raw nerve and bare bone. And while much on Aeroplane is set in Jeff Mangum's own personal dreamscape, it's also an oddly global record: the title track pines desperately for communion and unity and the stormy "Holland, 1945" seeks helplessly to erase history's awful mistakes. It's no coincidence the album's hero is a "two-headed boy," the perfect symbol of a yearning for wholeness while being pulled in two different and opposing directions. Like Riot, Mangum's arrangements are tarnished and crumbling: the brass is bleary and off-key, the guitars brittle and blown-out, the vocals arid as sandpaper and threatening to go sharp at any moment. For all its fitful moments of optimism, Aeroplane ends on a note of uncertainty; its freakish protagonist is left waiting for his miracle while an unnamed benefactor feeds him tomato and radio wire. What could have ended with uplift turns dark as Mangum croaks the album's final lyric: "Don't hate her when she gets up to leave." Right after that, he — audibly — does the same, leaving nothing but empty space and air, a stark and unsettling testament to our universal aloneness.

As close to a sister record to Riot as any on this list, Maggot Brain is gripped by the same sense of anxiety and impending doom — and that's just the first track. Bolstered by Eddie Hazel's astonishing, endless guitar solo, "Maggot Brain" serves as prologue to Funkadelic's ruined world. Which is not to say it's all bleariness: "Hit it and Quit It" and "You and Your Folks" are thick, grizzled funk jams, comprised of the same greasy slabs of sound that would fuel OutKast's music decades later. It's just that the party they soundtrack seems fueled by bad vibes and brown acid, a kind of fierce forced revelry as a way of keeping the demons at bay. "The rich got a big piece of this and that/ The poor got a big piece of roaches and rats" goes one particularly incendiary refrain, a reminder that the paupers were still outside the party, pressing their faces to the window. The pitched-up vocals on "A Whole Lot of BS" prefigure the same screwball approach of OutKast's "I'll Call Before I Cum." Maggot Brain is a behemoth, its music still grim and visionary, its message still relevant: rise above it all, or else drown in your own shit.

"It's a motherfucker," Sun Ra glibly declares at the outset of this weird, nearly lost album. The title track contains just a fistful of lyrics, but the trick is in the way Sun Ra and his Arkestra steadily adjust their volume and insistence. They sound bored at the outset, reciting "If they push that button, your ass gotta go," like it's a tired punchline. By the end, though, they're wild-eyed, yelling "Watcha gonna do without your ass?!?" The song in Sun-Ra's eyes was destined to be a dance classic — a dream soundly thrashed when his label, getting an earful of its R-Rated lyrics, refused to release it. The title track is the most obviously pessimistic, but the rest of the record lurches and sways with sadness. The blank, repetitive horn chart on "Retrospect" sounds like it could score time-lapse footage of the apocalypse — trees and buildings burning in slow-motion — and the skewed jazz of "Nameless One No. 2" sounding like nothing so much as the whole world spinning off its axis.