‘Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden Of Black Genius)’ Review: Questlove’s Passionate Doc Pays Long Overdue Homage To The Black Elvis – Sundance Film Festival
There’s a riot going on in Questlove’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning concert doc Summer of Soul, not least in the wardrobe department. Blazing a trail for the funkadelic/glam rock ’70s with metallic, tasseled jumpsuits that often literally tied themselves up with a bow in the middle, Sly Stone is long overdue for a film about his part in reconfiguring the face of popular music.
Everyone remembers — or, more importantly, is routinely obliged to remember — Elvis Presley and The Doors showing their faces on The Ed Sullivan Show. But less often highlighted is the 1968 appearance by Sly and the Family Stone, which saw its charismatic singer jump into the largely white, middle-aged male audience during a rousing medley of hits that included snippets of a song that would soon become “I Want to Take You Higher” (unlike The Doors’ Jim Morrison, Stone somehow snuck the h-word past the show’s producers).
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Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden of Black Genius) has two things going on, the first being a celebration of a genius singer-songwriter-producer who never really made it into the pantheon of greats. Though his heavy drug intake rivals that of the Stones’ Keith Richards — the soon-to-be 81-year-old only packed up his in-house pharmacy some six years ago — Stone refused to join the 27 club with his peers, like Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones or Janis Joplin. Some might say that the fate that awaited him, turning up on afternoon TV shows as a guest of the likes of Andy Williams, was a fate more undignified, but Stone’s refusal to give and die was the greatest revenge.
So that’s one half of Sly Lives!, the story of how pre-teen gospel singer Sly Stewart rose to become one of the most influential artists of the ’60s, bringing together black and white, male and female, the straights and the freaks in a career that, in retrospect, burned very briefly but very, very brightly. Stone wrote about this at length in his frank, funny and, for someone who did so much crack and PCP in his lifetime, surprisingly detailed 2023 memoir Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again) — indeed, the book is always there if it feels at times that Questlove is racing through the timeline. Nevertheless, the archive material is stunning, not just in the live footage from the good old days when Stone actually showed up to play but also in the news clips that act as a stark reminder of the dark side of the ’60s, with the assassinations of two Kennedys and Dr. Martin Luther King taking place against the nightmarish backdrop of the Vietnam War.
Stone sails through all this, seeing off the sneering disapproval of white America and the presumptuous demands of the Black Panthers with equal disdain, and for a time his band, the aptly named Sly and the Family Stone, become a republic within the republic. At the outset, they were genuine friends (if not more), buying dogs, cars and motorbikes, taking actual trips to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 on mescaline. Questlove cites Prince and the Revolution as a direct descendant of Stone’s integration-now, segregation-never lineup, which even featured a female trumpet player (his sometime partner Cynthia Robinson). It was this band that America fell in love with at Woodstock in 1969, the band that would have torn the roof off Max Yasgur’s 600-acre farm if there’d been a roof to blow off.
But though he’d been working towards it his whole life, fame did not sit easily on Stone’s shoulders. As one interviewee puts it, “Success can be more frightening than failure,” and this is the second strand of Questlove’s thesis. A sophisticated student of music, Stone was always fascinated by form, writing effortless chart stormers such as 1968’s “Dance to the Music” almost to order. Producer Jimmy Jam, whose iconic Stone sample fueled Janet Jackson’s 1989 hit “Rhythm Nation,” is especially good on Stone’s songwriting, deconstructing his approach to harmony and melody. (At this point it’s worth noting that comparisons to Presley are alluded to but never quite made; true, Elvis never wrote a song of his own, but, more than sharing a thing for rhinestones, he was also a similarly gifted arranger.)
The dissolution of the Family is seen as a sad, painfully slow affair, as, like Brian Wilson before him, Stone drifted off into his own solipsistic world of experimentation. As Questlove points out, reinvention is a luxury that’s mainly afforded to white musicians like David Bowie (interestingly, Stone released his 1972 hit “Runnin’ Away” at the same time that Bowie put out “Changes”; both songs are autobiographical but only one was noted as such). But the artistic wilderness of the late ’70s was to become more than the inevitable post-fame slump. While hip-hop artists were discovering Stone’s music in the ’80s (and presumably not paying the proper rates for the sampling rights), Stone was getting into crack cocaine, a habit that weighed him down for the whole decade.
In this sense, Sly Lives! could so easily have been a valediction, but, though it does not sugarcoat Stone’s addictions — his daughter has a dark but very funny childhood anecdote about playing a game of grown-ups that involved chopping up chalk for her friends to snort — Questlove has a lot of empathy for Stone’s crippling anxieties. Stone, by his own account, is too ill these days to do the thing he used to love, and, when we look back at his astonishing heyday, it’s a drag to think that there’ll be no more where that came from — not from him, not from anybody.
But, as far as Questlove is concerned, Stone came out the other side, these days more concerned with classic cars and pizza than chords, scales and raised supertonics. He is, as his kids say, “A standard old Black man,” ending the film with a surprise new beginning. Was this normality, deep down, the escape he was always looking for? As Beat writer William S. Burroughs once noted, “Life is very dangerous — and few survive it.”
Title: Sly Lives! AKA The Burden of Black Genius
Festival: Sundance (Premieres)
Distributor: Hulu
Director: Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
Running time: 1 hr 52 mins
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