Stand!

A call to stand that keeps changing its mind about how to say it. The verse melody is almost hymn-plain, Sly's lead sung with a preacher's patience over a gently rocking gospel figure, and the lyric addresses a listener directly — "there's a midget standing tall and the giant beside him about to fall" — as personal moral instruction rather than crowd rhetoric. Then, after the song appears to end, the whole thing detonates into a two-minute vamp: hand claps, a churchy piano riff, gang vocals, drums pushed forward until the record turns into a second-line procession. That structural joke is the emotional argument — conviction resolves not into a conclusion but into celebration. Sly's voice sits low and unhurried in the verses, generous rather than commanding, while the group answers him with the loose, overlapping warmth that made this band sound like a household. Coming in 1969, with movement optimism curdling, it manages sincerity without naïveté; it acknowledges cost ("you've been sitting much too long") before it dances. Best heard at the start of a day you've been dreading, or as the opening track it was designed to be, where its coda pulls you into everything that follows.