There's a Riot Goin' On

The band was due to deliver an album of new recordings by 1970, and a Greatest Hits collection was released in an eighteen-month stretch without new material, apart from one single. The album that followed was recorded in 1970 and 1971, mostly with Sly alone in a studio he had built at The Record Plant in Sausalito, or in the loft studio of his Bel Air home. He sometimes recorded his vocals lying in bed with a wireless microphone.

According to the other members, most of the album was played by Sly himself, overdubbing, with a Maestro Rhythm King MRK-2 drum machine used for some beats. He felt the box sounded unrealistic if used as designed, and so overdubbed the drum sounds by hand. The result was a thick mix, muddied further by erasing and overdubbing. For "Family Affair" and other tracks he used Billy Preston, Ike Turner and Bobby Womack in place of his bandmates. He delivered the final mixes to CBS in fall 1971.

The title was first planned as Africa Talks to You, and was changed after Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. The title track is silent and listed at zero seconds. In 1997 Sly said it had no running time because he felt there should be no riots. The sleeve shows a modified American flag with a black field and nine-point suns instead of stars, photographed by Stephen Paley. Sly told Jonathan Dakss that he wanted suns because stars imply searching, while the sun is always there.

The album topped both the Billboard 200 and the soul albums chart, reached number 4 in Canada and 31 in the UK, and was certified platinum in 2001. Reviews at first were divided. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times saw little worth attention, and Greil Marcus called it "Muzak with its finger on the trigger". Vince Aletti wrote in Rolling Stone that he began by hating it, then came to respect its honesty. Robert Christgau in the Village Voice called it one of those rare albums whose whole exceeds the sum of its parts. Rolling Stone placed it 99th on its 2003 list of 500 albums and 82nd in 2020, and Pitchfork ranked it fourth among the best albums of the 1970s. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.