Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson continues his welcome move into directing with the Hulu documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), a film that bursts with the beats, melodies, and virtuosic creativity of Sylvester Stewart, stage name Sly Stone, the brilliant songwriter and bandleader whose music with Sly and the Family Stone – “Dance to the Music,” “Everyday People,” “Stand!” – continues to endure. Sly was a Black genius. But as the parenthetical of the doc’s title suggests, that fact grew more diffuse and difficult to uphold as Stone’s career continued to evolve, his drug use took hold, and musicians he’d influenced became his competition. Celebrity is a strange power for anyone. But for a Black artist in particular, it can be a lot to live up to.
The Gist: It’s 1967, and Sylvester Stewart, better known as Sly Stone, has a message he’s saying with “Dance to the Music,” Sly and the Family Stone’s first hit on the pop charts: “All the squares go home!” So kick it in, and bring in those horns. The track was Sly and the band’s proper introduction to America at large, and in typical fashion for the singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer, it highlighted the individual contributions of Stone’s multiracial, mixed-gender group while blasting a funk, soul, and psychedelia-shaped hole in the side of the country’s consciousness.
“Sly had an uncanny ability to make every part of the song hooky,” Nile Rodgers says in Sly Lives! of classics like “Dance” and “Everyday People,” and a sense of music that drew from anywhere and everywhere, as long as it could make the listener feel something. The doc dips back to the San Francisco of the ‘60s, where Stone got his start in entertainment and Sly and the Family Stone formed, interviews band members like drummer Greg Errico and bassist Larry Graham, draws on archival interviews with Sly himself, and establishes a timeline that saw Stone’s unbound creativity and musical innovation feed a stardom that hit its euphoric zenith with Sly and the Family Stone’s set at Woodstock in 1969. “I wanna take you higher!” Sly sang with abandon, his fringed outfit flying in the stage lights.
The thing about success, though, as André 3000 notes in Sly Lives!, is that it kicks back. “It starts to work against why and what you’re doing. The same thing that made you great becomes the thing that kills you.”
What is Black genius? It’s a question Questlove poses in interviews with André, George Clinton, Chaka Khan, D’Angelo, Q-Tip, and Vernon Reid, and the thesis that drives Sly Lives! forward. As Sly Stone publicly confronted the burden of his own genius through music, it built his outsized persona and made him very wealthy. But as a Black artist, and especially a Black artist actively working through the racial tumult and social and political upheavals of America in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Sly’s success continued to be compared against the country’s expectations and assumptions. No one before him had been elevated to the level of a Black Elvis, says author and professor Mark Anthony Neal. And so, when the cycle of celebrity turned, and the drugs came in, Sly Stone had no blueprint for what might be next. “In the beginning, it was all about the music. Period,” Greg Errico says. “And then it became all about the other things.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Sly Lives! marks Questlove’s third outing as a director, and he’s on a roll. Summer of Soul (Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised) could be the opening act for your viewing of this film, with its absolutely electric 1969 performance footage from Sly and The Family Stone themselves, Stevie Wonder, The Staple Singers, and so many others. And the musical and visual curiosity Quest brings to Sly Lives! Is also apparent in the dynamically-edited mashup that opens his recent doc, Ladies & Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music.
Performance Worth Watching: The interview style Questlove employs for Sly Lives! Is somewhere between conversational and empathetic, and helps define the film’s tone – it’s informative and thoughtful in equal measure.
Memorable Dialogue: D’Angelo, considering Sly Stone in light of Questlove’s thesis, about the specific burden placed on Black excellence: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing music, sports, or anything you do. We as Black folk, we gotta always be three, four, five steps ahead of everybody else, in order just to break even.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: You have grooved to jams by Sly and the Family stone hundreds of times. But have you ever seen those songs? Don’t worry, Questlove’s got you. Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) tosses “Dance to the Music” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf)” into a kind of visualizer of its own design, where experts like legendary producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis deliver studied breakdowns of the material’s technical genius and highlight the components – pop hooks, funk licks, joyous unison vocals – that informed its universal accessibility. And timelessness. Jimmy Jam explains how he transformed the bridge from “Thank You” into the powerful beats and messaging of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation,” and later, Q-Tip and Quest take to an MPC to illustrate how Sly’s music influenced the hip-hop generation. If there was a companion doc to Sly Lives! where it was just breakdowns like these but for each and every Sly and the Family Stone song, we’d be on board forever.
In the meantime, the doc has a lot more to say. As he drives at the realities of racial perception and American culture’s relationship to Black creatives, Questlove centers Sly Stone as someone whose individuality and musical ability was irresistible, but also risked – or at times was – consumed and spit out. And the doc’s further comparison between Stone and a present-day example like Beyoncé and Cowboy Carter is apt. What burdens linked with Black genius continue to bear weight.
Our Call: Stream It! At every turn, Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) celebrates the ecstasy and accessibility of Sly and the Family Stone’s music. But beyond the narrative of Sly Stone’s career is a larger question about the nature of being Black, inspired, and visible in the United States of America.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.