Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor Sly Stone, who died on Monday (June 9) at age 82, by looking at the final of Sly & the Family Stone’s three Hot 100-toppers: the joyous but fractured “Family Affair.”

True to its name, Sly & the Family Stone had been the ultimate musical family affair. Of course, it literally comprised multiple siblings — Sly Stone (originally Sylvester Stewart) was of course the band’s brilliant leader and de facto frontman, while brother Freddie sang and played guitar, sister Rose sang and played keys, and sister Vet even occasionally filled in for Rose on tour. But it was the band’s familial spirit that originally sparked its jump-off-the-stereo brilliance, a palpable sense of shared love, excitement and unity. The on-record and on-stage product reflected the band’s real-life late-’60s closeness, as a Bay Area-based unit that happily did everything together: In 2025’s Questlove-helmed Sly Lives documentary, the group waxes nostalgic about how they’d all ride bikes together, watch movies together, even buy dogs together. “I think we spent more time together than we spent with our family members,” recalled trumpeter and singer Cynthia Robinson.

By 1971, the band was decidedly no longer doing everything together, and much of what they did was less than happy. As the band became superstars in 1969, and Sly Stone one of the leading voices and faces of popular music, internal pressures and tensions mounted, outside demands intensified both about their recorded output and their political positioning, and Sly began to retreat. He moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, self-medicated heavily with drugs, came late to gigs or no-showed altogether, and generally began to isolate himself from the rest of the group. The group’s final single of the ’60s, the double-A side “Thank You Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin”/”Everybody Is a Star,” had been a 1970 No. 1 hit, but already displayed a growing disillusionment with the skyrocketing success of the band’s Stand! and “Everyday People” days. It would be the previously prolific outfit’s final release for nearly two years.

When Sly & the Family Stone returned in late 1971, it was with “Family Affair,” an R&B gem that was at once of a piece with the celebratory pop-soul anthems the group had made his name with, and sounded like a different outfit altogether. Though the song still felt warm, soothing and hooky as hell, the group’s earlier spirit of triumph, jubilation, defiance, energy and above all, togetherness, had largely disappeared. Even “Thank You,” for all its creeping darkness, still felt like the band was all in the fight together; by “Family Affair,” they barely sounded like a band at all.

In fact, the most bitterly ironic thing about “Family Affair” — which served as the lead single from that November’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On LP — is that Sly is the only member of the Family Stone to actually play on it. (Probably, anyway; the Riot sessions were so messy and hazy that no one seems 100% positive of exactly who did what.) Rose does sing the song’s iconic chorus, but instrumentally, the song is nearly all Sly, with additional electric piano by star keyboardist Billy Preston and some guitar croaks from rising soul hitmaker Bobby Womack. The Family Stone’s leader most likely provided the rest, including all the verse vocals, bass and additional guitar.

The final instrument played by Stone on the track was the newest and perhaps most important to the musical direction of “Affair” and Riot in general: the Maestro Rhythm King MRK–2. Drummer Greg Errico had gotten fed up with the discord within the group and left earlier in ’71 midway through the Riot recording; rather than immediately replace him with a new stickman, Stone decided to fill out the remaining tracks with the rudimentary early drum machine and its genre presets. But he allowed the machine to work for his purposes by essentially slotting its canned bossa nova rhythm askew within the song’s groove — like J Dilla might have done decades later — giving the liquid-funk shuffle of “Family Affair” a little extra slipperiness. Even Errico, with every reason in the word to take offense at essentially being replaced by an underqualified robot, had to give it up to the bandleader for his innovation: “[He] took the rhythm that [the machine] was producing and turned it inside out,” the drummer raved in Sly Lives! “It made it, ‘Oh, that’s interesting now.’ And he actually crated an iconic thing with it. It became a game-changer again.” 

Sly & the Family Stone, Forever No. 1: “Everyday People” (1969) / “Thank You Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin” (1970)

The song’s untraditional groove was matched by a near-unrecognizable Sly Stone vocal that almost felt like just another instrumental texture. Previous records had featured his clear vocal piercing through his productions with shout-along sentiments, or as one voice among many in delivering strength-in-numbers statements. This was new: a heavily filtered Stone seemingly singing from a remote corner of the studio, feeling more like a disembodied narrator than a leading man. What’s more, his singing register had dropped, as if he’d aged multiple decades (or gone through a second puberty) in between Stand! and Riot, with the result landing Stone somewhere between crooning and sing-speaking.

The vocals were jarring, but so were the lyrics. In 1969, a “Family Affair” would be an occasion for joy and revelry, but by 1971, it was a little more complicated — and the family portrait painted by Stone was of a largely dysfunctional unit, with siblings who head in different directions, newlyweds with maybe-straying eyes, and fraught emotions running high all around. “You can’t leave ’cause your heart is there/ But, sure, you can’t stay ’cause you been somewhere else,” Stone sings of his own conflicted feelings in the song’s most revealing passage. “You can’t cry ’cause you’ll look broke down/ But you’re cryin’ anyway ’cause you’re all broke down.”

But downers don’t usually become No. 1 hits — and indeed, despite the heavy dynamics of this “Family Affair,” the ultimate feeling is still more one of welcoming than of alienation. Partly, that’s because of the gleeful boogie Preston’s plush keys and Sly’s aqueous guitars do around the song’s rain-slicked beat, and largely, that’s because Rose’s “It’s a family affaaiiiiii-iiiiirrrr…” callouts — the first vocals of any kind you hear in the song — are so comforting and inviting that it can’t help but rub off on the rest of the song. But it’s also because, even with Sly’s clearly mixed feelings about his own place within the family, he still feels audibly connected to it; it’s a complex relationship, but still a loving one at heart. “Blood’s thicker than the mud,” he proclaims early in the song, and despite everything, he sounds like he means it.

Unfortunately, the Family Stone had already begun to splinter. Errico was the first out the door, the next year, bassist Larry Graham followed. As the band began to lose its center and as Sly’s productivity and reliability both stalled, so did its commercial success: the long-awaited There’s a Riot Goin’ On topped the Billboard 200 and is hailed today as a classic (despite drawing mixed reviews at the time for its murky production and disjointed jams), but “Family Affair” was its only single to even reach the Hot 100’s top 20. Fresh, released in 1973, saw the band returning to greater accessibility, and kept up its streak of classic lead singles with the slithering “If You Want Me to Stay.” But even that song missed the top 10, and as acolytes like the Ohio Players and Parliament-Funkadelic had replaced the band at funk’s forefront, the Family Stone’s relevance continued to slide until officially splitting in 1975.

Considering Sly Stone was just 32 when the Family Stone dissolved for the first time, it feels both deeply sad and highly improbable that his career never really found a proper second act. But Sly’s subsequent attempts throughout the late ’70s and ’80s to launch a solo career or revive the Family Stone with a new lineup largely fell on deaf ears; even a seemingly world-stopping (or at least potentially career-re-sparking) collaborative endeavor alongside P-Funk leader George Clinton fell into disarray and resulted in an album that was mostly dismissed critically and commercially. Drug abuse continued to take its toll on an increasingly reclusive Sly, and despite sporadic reappearances over the last four decades, a true comeback was never really in the cards for the music legend.

But even if his own presence was minimal over the past half-century, the impact of Sly Stone’s music remained seismic. Outside of setting the early standard for what would become funk’s golden age in the early ’70s, the Family Stone’s catalog remained one of the most well-mined sample sources across the ’80s and ’90s for N.W.A, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, Beck, Janet Jackson and countless other game-changing acts. And that impact certainly endured into the 21st century: In the first couple years of the ’00s alone, D’Angelo released the massively acclaimed and heavily Riot-inspired Voodoo, while OutKast referenced that album’s bullet-ridden American flag imagery on the cover to their universally beloved Stankonia, and Mary J. Blige had a Hot 100 No. 1 with a “Family Affair” of her own. As messy as things could ever get with Sly Stone or his legacy, the blood would always remain thicker than the mud.

The producers of a horror movie starring 50 Cent are blasting the rapper’s “baseless” lawsuit aimed at blocking its release, calling it a “last-minute shakedown.”

Fifty (Curtis Jackson) sued earlier this year to stop the premiere of SkillHouse, an upcoming horror movie in which he plays a big role, over claims that he never signed off. He claimed producer Ryan Kavanaugh had not paid him “a dime” and he had “no creative input.”

But in a scathing response on Thursday, Kavanaugh’s attorneys say the rap star “time and time again” gave his clear approval for the project – and that he cannot now “kneecap the film on the eve of its release.”

“After almost three years of acknowledging his agreement to appear in the film, Jackson seeks to enjoin SkillHouse from its impending theatrical release,” Kavanaugh’s lawyers write. “This is a baseless and last-minute shakedown.”

Set for release July 11, SkillHouse is billed as a “social media nightmare,” in which ten influencers are kidnapped and forced to compete in a “deadly showdown” where “every like, share, and follow is a fight for survival.” While 50 Cent has the top billing, the movie also stars actual creators (Bryce Hall and Hannah Stocking) with huge followings on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

Fifty filed his lawsuit in April, claiming he filmed the movie back in 2022 without a formal contract because he trusted that one would be signed later. But he says it never was — and that the producers cannot use his name and likeness without one.

“Defendants have billed Jackson as the star and producer of the film [and] have shamelessly and deceptively marketed the film as a ‘50 Cent Movie’ and ‘produced by 50 Cent,’ when it is nothing of the sort,” his lawyers wrote at the time.

But in Thursday’s response, attorneys for Kavanaugh and the movie’s production company say they have “a mountain of documentary evidence” that he did, in fact, agree to appear in and promote SkillHouse – including a tweet in which he bragged that it would “elevate horror to another level.” And they say 50 cannot “come close” to showing the kind of permanent damage that would necessitate an injunction blocking the movie’s premiere.

“Jackson cannot show irreparable harm from being associated with a well-received film he repeatedly touted his involvement in,” write Kavanaugh’s lawyers. “Moreover, he certainly cannot show an urgent need for action by the court when he, for almost three years, has known about (and approved) what he now contends is misappropriation.”

An attorney for 50 Cent did not immediately return a request for comment.

By the time the world premiere of the documentary Matter of Time and a panel with key figures from it finished, the Tribeca Festival audience gathered in lower Manhattan on Thursday (June 12) was jonesing for the final part of the night’s programming: a solo acoustic performance by Eddie Vedder. Much to their relief, they didn’t have to wait long.

“That was a quick five-minute changeover,” the Pearl Jam frontman said as he took the stage. “That was very Saturday Night Live – and it’s only Thursday.”

Vedder wasn’t just in Tribeca as a performer, but as an activist and philanthropist. Matter of Time documents the work of the EB Research Partnership, a nonprofit founded by Vedder and his wife, Jill, dedicated to treating the rare genetic disorder Epidermolysis Bullosa, and a pair of Seattle concerts Vedder played during the organization’s Venture Into Cures Summit in October 2023.

After thanking “Bob” – “He bought my mom dinner once for her birthday, so I feel like I can call him Bob now,” Vedder quipped of Tribeca Festival co-founder Robert De Niro – the singer turned to the audience. “I just can’t thank you enough for taking that journey with us,” he said. “To accept all that information and all that emotion and be supporting and give us a way to ride the surfboard of hope – we are very, very grateful.”

As the screen behind him displayed pictures of EB patients – most of them children – Vedder launched into his first song, a heartfelt cover of Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me In Your Heart.” The selection was emblematic of the six-song set, where a loose, reflective Vedder leaned heavily on covers. “If I f–k it up, you don’t really have to tell anybody,” he joked before the next song, a rendition of Tom Waits’ “Picture In a Frame” that he said he hadn’t planned to play.

After bringing out the singer-songwriter Glen Hansard to handle guitar duties for Hansard’s own “The Song of Good Hope,” Vedder continued on solo with a rousing version of Pearl Jam’s Ten classic “Porch.” He may have flubbed a transition in the song – “I think I just messed that up!” he remarked during it – but the audience gave him a standing ovation anyway.

“That was very generous, thank you,” Vedder said, before referencing Dr. Jean Tang, a Stanford researcher featured in Matter of Time. During Thursday’s panel, she explained that, with EBRP’s help, a new gene therapy treatment for the condition received FDA approval two months ago. “It wasn’t quite as loud as the ovation that science got, and I couldn’t be happier about that,” Vedder happily declared. “I’ll take a backseat to rock star Jean Tang any day.”

Moderated by Tribeca’s Casey Baron, Tang appeared on the brief panel with Jill Vedder, Matter of Time director Matt Finlin, EBRP CEO Michael Hund, and a young EB patient, Rowan, and her mother, Kate. “We need the cure, I’ve been waiting eight years!” Rowan good-naturedly told Tang. “But thank you for your science stuff.”

As the documentary and panel detailed, EB research has increased by leaps and bounds since the creation of EBRP in 2010. For the Vedders, the cause is personal: They were spurred into action after meeting a friend’s child who had EB. “There was nothing then,” Jill said during the panel. Today, with three FDA-approved treatments available, “it really feels like this [a cure] can happen in our lifetime. It really does feel close, and I’m really proud of our families for opening themselves up. We asked a lot of you to be in this film. Thank you for trusting us.”

While Matter of Time weaves in several Vedder performances from his two concerts at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall – Pearl Jam classics like “Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town” and “Better Man” and deep cuts like 2020’s “River Cross” shine – the film is primarily about the lives of EB patients and their families, and the researchers who are working toward a cure. Many of them attended the 2023 shows; the most powerful musical moment in the documentary isn’t any Pearl Jam song, but rather “Say Hi,” which Vedder wrote for the young patient Eli – “My friend, my teacher, my hero,” as Vedder describes him to the Seattle concert audience – who is featured heavily in the documentary and attended Thursday night’s premiere.

In Matter of Time, Jill says EBRP’s research isn’t just critical to curing EB – a devastating disease that one parent in the film says makes patients’ skin “slide off like skin on a ripe peach” – but to providing a model for private funding to support research of rare conditions at a time when public funding is often insufficient. Another parent in the film sums up the extent to which the Vedders’ activism has impacted the EB community: “They changed dread into hope.”

So, naturally, Tang received as impassioned an ovation when she spoke on Thursday as Vedder did – something that clearly buoyed him as he wrapped his set, with covers of Wayne Cochran’s “Last Kiss,” which Pearl Jam has played regularly for nearly 30 years, and Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” which also features prominently in the documentary. When the crowd stood one final time to applaud, it wasn’t just for Vedder’s energetic performance, but for the efforts and perseverance on display throughout the evening. “Much love,” Vedder said, as he stood to exit. “Thank you.”

As he releases his 11th studio album Broken Branches, out today (June 13), Dierks Bentley knows more than a bit about constructing an album — and a career — that’s going to endure. After two decades spent notching 18 chart-topping Country Airplay hits and establishing himself as seasoned headliner, the artist, who spent nights early in his career soaking in bluegrass music at Nashville’s Station Inn and who collaborated with the bluegrass stalwarts Del McCoury Band on his debut 2003 album, says he’s tried to approach his career like a bluegrass band does a performance.

“It’s very collaborative, and all the pieces are important. You can’t make bluegrass music without all those unique instruments and unique voices,” Bentley tells Billboard. “I’ve tried to work with great people in every aspect of my career. It’s mixing my love of bluegrass instrumentation with my love of playing big rooms, and that requires big electric guitars and drums and bass. The original idea was to mix the bluegrass with the kickass, and I’m still trying to do that.”

On Broken Branches, he collaborated with a tight-knit group of fellow artists, producers and writers, including Ross Copperman and Jon Randall, and feted musicians including Jedd Hughes, Rob McNelly, Bryan Sutton and Charlie Worsham (who also plays in Bentley’s road band).

“They know my music and are able to take it places that maybe I hadn’t even thought about,” Bentley says. “They know it from underneath the car — I might be driving the car, but they know all the nuts and bolts of it, so it’s great working with those musicians.”

Bentley co-wrote four of the album’s 11 songs, infusing witty lyrics into “She Hates Me,” or examining the toils and rewards of working toward a goal on “Something Worth Fixing.” But most of the project finds him locked in on highlighting the songs of other writers.

“There’s people around me that are like, ‘Hey, you need to have some more songs on there that you wrote.’ I just want great songs,” he says. “I love being a big fan and proponent of the Nashville songwriting community. Nobody writes songs like Nashville. I have such respect for it, and I feel lucky [and] grateful to have some temporary ownership of some of these great songs on this record.”

Fifteen years ago, Bentley collaborated with Miranda Lambert and Jamey Johnson on “Bad Angel” from his 2010 Up on the Ridge bluegrass album. On Broken Branches, Bentley and Lambert reunite for the banjo-inflected “Never You.”

“She’s someone I’ve known forever and whose voice I love,” he says. “She’s exactly who she is offstage as she is onstage, and she is awesome. I sent the song to her, and she was in Scottsdale [Arizona]. She went into a studio we found out there and put down the vocal. She’s one of the true trailblazers in country music.”

When Bentley heard the song “Broken Branches,” written by Zach Abend, Beau Bailey and “Oil Money” hitmaker Graham Barham, he says it “gave us a story” to construct the album around.” He invited Riley Green and Country Music Hall of Fame member John Anderson to sing with him, linking together three generations of country hitmakers.

Green was Bentley’s first call. “Right away he was in on it and a couple of days later we were in the studio. While he’s singing, I was thinking, ‘How can I make this even more special?’” he recalls. “John Anderson came to mind, because the link between ‘Broken Branches’ and [Anderson’s 1983 hit] ‘Black Sheep,’ just subconsciously hit me. He came in the studio by himself like a week later. What a legend. He came off the road—he drives himself in his RV to all his gigs, which is so classic. His RV had broken down in Valdosta, Georgia and he spent three days in a motel—hard M—waiting to get it fixed. He’s the real deal and always has been.”

The song wraps with a bit of good-natured, ad-libbed ribbing as Bentley, Green and Anderson ended up recording the ending together. “You hear us talking [like on] Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett’s ‘It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,’ I like that stuff,” Bentley says. “It’s funny and it sticks out in my mind when I listen to those records. This song, it was all done together. It wasn’t no AI, no overdubbing or editing, just us around one mic kind of giving each other crap.”

The song naturally felt like the title track that tied the project together. “When I’m looking for songs, I’m trying to find those songs that are like little broken branches off the family tree,” Bentley explains. “Not the big popular ones, not the ones that sound like a big hit on radio. Those are great, but I’m trying to find songs that are a little bit different.”

He adds, “That really started with the [2014] Riser record and the song ‘Riser.’ I heard ‘Broken Branches’ and thought it’s a great song because I’m a broken branch. Most of my friends are broken branches. All the people I know that came to Nashville to do something in music are doing something that their family probably didn’t do. And they’re doing it; they love country music.”

Throughout his career, Bentley has prioritized lifting up the next generation of artists, sifting through sounds and championing those artists whose music catches his ear. Burgeoning artist Stephen Wilson Jr. co-wrote two songs on the album, “Cold Beer Can” and “Something Worth Fixing.” Bentley has also shared the stage with recent breakout artists like Red Clay Strays and Zach Top, the latter of whom is opening for Bentley on his the Broken Branches tour.

“I love the spot I’m in in country music. I’ve been around a lot of the older cats, and I love those guys—but I also love watching what the younger artists are doing,” he says. “I love what’s happening in country music right now and I love seeing those guys have that success. I first saw Red Clay Strays play at our Seven Peaks Festival a while back. I probably personally told like 500 people about those guys. Same with Zach. I’ve known about him since his bluegrass days, just [through] having a bunch of bluegrass guys in my band. Watching him come over to country and do what he’s done, it’s been fun to watch.”

The album ends with the reflective “Don’t Cry For Me,” which Bentley wrote with Jim Beavers. The song finds him taking stock of his life and career thus far and assuring that he’s happy with how it’s all turned out.

“It’s very personal for me just knowing that one day it all does come to an end, whether it’s your music career or your life,” he says. “I’ve been really blessed in my time here in Nashville. It’s just been a great career and I’ve still got a lot left, hopefully, to do.”

One thing not on that list? Making movies.

Though many of Bentley’s music videos, including the clip for “She Hates Me,” make use of his natural comedic talents, that’s as far as he’s likely to go as an actor. “I love making music videos, but I don’t have any desire to do anything beyond that,” he explains. “I get sent some stuff, and sometimes people think, ‘Hey, everyone just wants to be in a movie,’ and I just don’t. I love film and movies and shows, but I think I’m pretty good in my lane.”

But it’s likely fans could see him once again revisiting his bluegrass roots: “I think about that all the time when I’m listening to [SiriusXM channel] Bluegrass Junction. It’d be fun to make another record like that.”