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Both were 82 when they died. Wilson was born almost a year earlier, and fame arrived for him slightly younger. Both were Californians (though Sly moved there at a young age from Texas), and made music that started out like primary color versions of that state’s mid-century utopian dream and ended up shaded with the darkness that crept into the late 1960s. Both led bands featuring their siblings. Both made era- and genre-defining hits. Both were studio visionaries. Both struggled with mental health issues and/or drug use that derailed their careers. Both, as my colleague (and your usual newsletter author) Ann Powers put it to me in a text message earlier this week, used their music to imagine better worlds. Both inspired a competition in their peers that drove music to new heights.
There are certain musicians whose legacies you start to imagine before they actually depart, and both Sly Stone and Brian Wilson battled to stay in the world, which is another way of saying they survived longer than you might have thought they would. In no way do I mean to suggest that I was ready for either departure when it eventually arrived. The way they have come to feel cosmically entwined only makes the dual losses heavier.
Of course, the way their lives and legacies diverged has something to do with that heaviness too. Wilson always came off as almost unbearably shy, and eventually retreated into the studio, and then his bedroom. Stone was a stunningly magnetic performer who could captivate with a raised eyebrow but worked tirelessly to keep audiences entertained. The Beach Boys were an all-white harmony group whose songs’ subjects were naive even when they touched something emotionally deep. The Family Stone was a multi-racial, genre-busting party band that came out of the gate addressing racial inequality. |
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Ellis Herwig/Boston Globe/Getty Images |
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Earlier this year, the drummer and Oscar-winning filmmaker Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson released a documentary called Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) which makes a strong case for the collective shame the music industry should feel for failing to protect and honor Stone. After Wilson’s death, New York Magazine’s Craig Jenkins compared that abandonment to the support the Beach Boy got throughout the breakdowns that stymied his creative work — a double standard that resulted in Wilson getting to rework or finish legendary lost albums and adulation from generations of younger musicians. Jenkins’ argument is more than fair. If you want a glimpse of how NPR covered Brian Wilson in the 21st century, our editor Hazel Cills compiled a sampling of the best interviews, live concert recordings and tributes to his work that we produced. As far as I can tell, Sly Stone was never interviewed by NPR.
The music itself doesn’t lie, though, and if you need one more common thread, frivolous though it may be, I’ll oblige. Both bands released perfect greatest hits compilations that arguably don’t include their greatest work: The Family Stone’s Greatest Hits came out in 1970, a year before the band had even released its epochal There’s a Riot Goin’ On. The Beach Boys’ 1974 collection Endless Summer pulled together that group’s early surf anthems in the wake of the proto-’60s nostalgia that the film American Graffiti had kick-started a year earlier, but didn’t make space for anything from Pet Sounds. Both of those collections, for what it’s worth, had gorgeous album covers that probably attracted neophytes who then traveled deeper into their creators’ legends.
I have spent the last few days toggling back and forth between albums and songs by Sly & The Family Stone and The Beach Boys, the way we do when a beloved musician dies, trying to get a handle on that cosmic connection between Wilson and Stone and letting my listening drift past those greatest hits. Toward The Beach Boys’ yacht-rock-on-rough-seas prototype “Sail on, Sailor” and the buzzing post-crackup album Wild Honey. Back to the opening track on The Family Stone’s first album, the “Frère Jacques”-quoting mission statement “Underdog” (“they won’t let you forget”) and forward to the band’s last pop hit, 1973’s “If You Want Me to Stay,” which shifts its internal balance irresistibly over its brief three minutes without ever losing its momentum (my record collection for an hour-long edit of that bass line). |
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More stories from NPR Music |
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If you want to read Ann Powers on Brian Wilson’s life and music, she wrote his obituary for NPR Music. It’s gorgeous.
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Equally worth your time: Brandon Gates’s obit for Sly Stone.
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There’s a frontrunner for the song of the summer. Stephen Thompson’s not thrilled about it.
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Pop music trend watchers looking deeper at the chart might have noticed something unusual recently: There’s more than one song from a Christian Contemporary artist on Billboard’s Hot 100. It’s the first time that’s been true in over a decade, and Emma Madden has the story of how it happened.
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If you’re in the mood to indulge in music and … something more, Chloe Veltman takes a look at the history of drinking songs as a way to toast the arrival of a new historical compilation called Drinking In Here that was culled from the archive of Alan and John Lomax.
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At the federal criminal trial of Sean Combs in Manhattan, most of this week was dedicated to the testimony of a woman identified only as “Jane.” She is an ex-girlfriend of Combs, and one of two women (the other being Cassie Ventura) upon whose experience the government’s sex trafficking charges are built. Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, who has been at the courthouse, shares her story.
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