“Everyday People” is a curious beast. It’s a thesis statement for Sly Stone’s entire enterprise, a perfect-world vision of people from different races and different walks of life learning how to come together and respect each other’s differences. But it was also a departure from the band’s freaked-out chaos. It’s a two-minute soul heater with clean, pronounced hooks, a bugged-out band’s fairly straightforward idea of pop music at work.
The beat of “Everyday People” is almost machinelike, the bass and drums locked in together rather than going off on their own voyage, as they sometimes were in this band. The horns do a pretty good imitation of the Stax house band, but the vocals stay buried in the mix, a reflection of a Bay Area acid-rock scene where the vocals were almost an afterthought. We hear little bursts of gurgly guitar fuzz or rumbling drums, but this is pretty clearly a band holding back, possibly at the behest of a label that was determined to harness their considerable pop-music power before they spun off into insanity again.
49 years after “Everyday People,” the song’s message feels trite in an after-school-special sort of way — not because things are any better between the races in this country, but because we’ve all had its lessons baked into our heads from years of schooling and cultural conditioning. A single line from “Everyday People,” “different strokes for different folks,” became the basis for a sitcom that ran for eight seasons on NBC. (I don’t know whether the “scooby dooby doo” line inspired the cartoon dog, but I do know that Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! debuted on CBS seven months after “Everyday People” hit #1. So… probably?)
The ideas within “Everyday People” have become such a deeply embedded presence within mainstream American thought that the song itself sounds pat. In 1968, I have to imagine that it was a whole lot more urgent. Civil rights leaders were being gunned down, and racial violence was driving every big news story, so this warm-hearted and gibberish-laced anthem of togetherness struck a chord. Maybe it was revolutionary then. Today, it’s simply a good song. From: https://www.stereogum.com/2023240/the-number-ones-sly-the-family-stones-everyday-people/columns/the-number-ones/
