The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh

57 DANCE TO THE MUSIC, Sly and the Family Stone Written and produced by Sly Stone Epic 10256 1968 Billboard: #8

I first heard "Dance to the Music" in a high school lunch line when a friend thrust a pocket-size transistor at my ear. "You won't believe this," he said. Who could've? Except for "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," no great single has broken so many rules and reestablished them in its own image. Sly found a funky equivalent of the white rock artiness of the Who and the Yardbirds -- without losing a shred of R&B's danceability. The lyric simply describes what's happening in the song, starting from scratch and adding one instrument at a time to build up a powerhouse of psychedelic R&B, replete with call-and-response vocals, briefly interjected solos, interspersed cries of surprised glee, and a beat.that bulldozes everything in its path. It's all so joyous that it's easy to miss the "message" declared by horn players Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini: " All the squares go home!" "Dance to the Music" arrived at the instant when black and white pop achieved their greatest closeness and began to move apart again, after more than a decade of frequently harmonious intersection. Since then, from Kool and the Gang to Prince, Sly and "Dance to the Music" have never been far away, and as the nineties open, their influence on pop dance music is as strong as anyone's -- even James Brown's.

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