perfidy

Between 1968 and 1973, Sly and the Family Stone had an amazing run. Between their instantly legendary performance at Woodstock and their last hit album in 1973, the band would release three classic records: 1969's Stand!, a party record full of hope and vitriol that is for my money the best album of the 1960s or '70s; 1971's There's A Riot Goin' On, a claustrophobic and paranoid funk workout that jettisoned the upbeat veneer that had lightened Stand!; and 1973's Fresh, full of more conventional grooves but lyrics just as outspoken as the previous two albums.

The Family Stone's signature blend of rock, funk and soul has become a fundamental ingredient of modern hip-hop, R&B and neo-soul, and the legacy of Sly Stone (whose real name is Sylvester Stewart) as a musical innovator remains undimmed. The Family Stone was also the first fully integrated band to hit the big time, an innovation that has not endured quite as well. Unfortunately, with this titanic string of successes came a spiraling drug problem that seemed to sap Stewart's mojo. Although he continued to turn out mediocre-to-decent albums, by 1976 his career was undeniably petering out. Since then Stewart has been reclusive, occasionally turning up to record a (usually perplexing) track here and there.

Considering that The Family Stone remain an important if relatively under-celebrated force in popular music, and considering that the band's leader is apparently no longer able to make new music, Sony's recent idea almost makes sense.

The company owns all the master tapes to the great Sly & The Family Stone albums. On their own these tapes are just sitting in a climate controlled room sucking up rent and not producing income. But if Sony were to lend those tapes out to a wide variety of chart-topping artists - The Roots, Maroon 5, John Legend, will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, Chuck D, Big Boi of Outkast, Buddy Guy, and so on, to do with them what they please, Sony has a chance to hit that beautiful spot where a cheaply produced album will successfully market to multiple audiences and sell like crackberry hotcakes.

This is an excellent way to make easy money, especially now that the recording industry as a whole has run like Wile E. Coyote off a cliff and is only moving forward thanks to momentum. If the whole label-distributor-retailer physical-product sales scheme is to survive a little longer, it is high time to grab the easy cash wherever it can be found.

So that is exactly what Sony did: lent the tapes out to a number of artists with the understanding that each artist take an original song in its final form and use it to create a new piece of music. Do they creatively lift portions of a song and radically incorporate them into a new track? Do they remix the original substantially, adding their own creations here and there? Or do they just let the original tape roll and overdub a wanky guitar solo or new vocal wherever it fits?

No matter what the strategy, the final result should ideally be a cross between hybrid and homage, a live-action mashup of the old and new. And given the high quality of the originals, artists need to really deliver the goods if their own contributions are going to measure up. Sony even got Sylvester Stewart to give his approval to the enterprise, so this album is coming out as a Sly & The Family Stone recording complete with Sly Stone's own thumbs-up.

The result, titled Different Strokes by Different Folks, is a creatively bankrupt collection of mostly terrible vandalisms of some of the best songs by Sly & The Family Stone. But make no mistake. Despite the billing, this is not a Sly and the Family Stone recording. Instead, it is an awful and embarrassing collection of sort-of covers by some of the biggest names in music.

The worst offenders fall into two categories; those who don't seem to even understand what worked about the songs they are "covering," and those who have nothing new to add, meaning their contributions are at best extraneous and distracting.

Two examples sum up the first group. Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas shoehorns the fuzzy driving stomp of "Dance To The Music" into a boring, plodding and nearly undanceable Black Eyed Peas-style "funk" track. The song's throbbing groove is replaced with a lurching two-note riff that sucks all the fun out of the original tune's vocals.

Worse yet, Nappy Roots and Martin Luther manage to miss the entire point of "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey." Whereas the original provocatively explored the dilemmas inherent in American racial politics and pleaded for a solution, the new version jettisons all that in favor of a verse of stock thug/hustler rhymes complete with Glocks and rocks and 'doing what you got to do', a verse about how white kids call each other "nigger," and a verse-long complaint about how black kids today are too materialistic and listen to too much gangsta rap like, presumably, the first verse of the song.

In the second category, Stephen Tyler and Robert Randolph tackle "I Want To Take You Higher" by basically singing and playing along with the complete original master track. Apart from a few seconds of gospel-style introductory music, the entire track is practically intact except that about half of Sly Stone's vocal lines are cut out to make room for Tyler's. The result is perfectly unimpressive; I did the same thing in my bedroom when I was sixteen with a four-track and a Pink Floyd album. But like most things I did alone in my bedroom at sixteen, I never felt the results worthy of public scrutiny.

Devin Lima's version of "If You Want Me To Stay" dresses up the original with new percussion and skritchy guitar that neither adds to nor detracts from the song, but his vocal is a close impression of Sly Stone's original - sometimes so close that I can only tell some of his contributions apart from the portions of Stone's that remain because I have heard the original hundreds of times. While an interesting exercise in impersonation, it is also totally pointless.

The missteps abound. Moby turns "Love City" into a Moby song, too techno for day-spas and too limp for clubs. Buddy Guy and John Mayer (John Mayer?!? When the hell did this walking haircut get street cred??) make space in "You Can Make It If You Try" for some wanky solos that really contribute nothing to the original. John Legend and Joss Stone prove by negative example the value of restraint on a remixed and over-sung version of "Family Affair" that interpolates a few seconds of the Family Stone's "Loose Booty." John Legend and Joss Stone are phenomenally talented newcomers. Unfortunately, as with Stone's appearance with Melissa Etheridge at the 2005 Grammys, all they prove is how far they have to go before they can stand shoulder to shoulder with their idols.

The most disappointing thing is how many people involved in this project should know better. Why did Isaac Hayes and Chuck D agree to participate? Their updated version of "Sing A Simple Song" with D'Angelo basically amounts to Chuck D rapping over the original track about how great a song it is, D'Angelo singing a line or two, and Isaac Hayes literally saying a word here or there. The final result sounds merely rushed and stitched together. So, Chuck... the original was that good? Then why not shut the hell up and let me hear it uninterrupted?

Not everything is so dire. A few interesting choices partially redeem some participants. The Roots, for example, submerge "Star" in their own track in a way that seems more like homage and less like cannibalism, and Maroon 5 (of all people) radically re-conceive "Everyday People" as a techno-guitar workout. This experiment doesn't quite work, but it at least is much bolder than most of the limp and uninspired dreck included elsewhere.

The best cut is probably the last, where DJ Reset does a mashup of Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation 1814" with the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" to surprisingly good effect. Jackson used a sample of "Thank You" as the basis of the original "Rhythm Nation," so although this pairing is obvious, it also works perfectly well.

All in all, Different Strokes by Different Folks does one thing: the album makes me desperate to listen to the original Sly and the Family Stone songs free of all the extra crap and doodazzery smeared on top. I urge all interested souls to pass this compilation by and invest a little money in the original albums. Stand! should be in absolutely everyone's record collection, and There's A Riot Goin' On and Fresh, as well as the Greatest Hits album that sums up everything pre-Stand!, are not far behind.

Different Strokes By Different Folks is a total stinkbomb, a waste of time and money that reflects well on practically no one involved and makes the iconic music of Sly and the Family Stone seem lesser by association. It is too much to expect that Sony Music Group and its employees will ever feel shame over releasing this cheap and cheesy little low profile cash-in at a whopping $18.98 retail, much less billing it as a Sly & The Family Stone album, but at least I can dream that some day when their shortsightedness, avarice, and allergy to creative business practices put them out of work, they come to regret a few of their mistakes.