“Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)” is a dazzling and definitive funk-pop documentary. It’s the second “jawn” directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, and he has leveled up from his first, “Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” — though that lyrical-flashback-to-1969-in-Harlem concert film, in its way, was beautiful. In “Sly Lives!,” Questlove confronts the life and legacy of Sly Stone, investigates it, holds it up to the light, tears it apart, and puts it back together like the bravura mixmaster he is. Sly’s first hit was “Dance to the Music,” and Questlove wants you to dance to the music, to feel it and think it, know how it was made, and hear how its vibrations went out into the world. This is a movie made by a maestro musician and D.J.-turned-master director.
Jammed with penetrating interviews and extraordinary archival footage, “Sly Lives!” is a movie that knows how to take the time to meditate on what it’s showing you. Yet much of it goes by in a kaleidoscopic fashion that tickles your eyes and ears. That’s because Questlove, while hewing to a classical journalistic documentary tradition, is working furiously to get it all in — the vast, extraordinary story of how Sly Stone, starting in the late ’60s, became the rock star of his moment, smashing through boundaries of sound and image, scaling the peak of a new kind of Black fame, to the point that he had nowhere to go but down. And he did. Dramatically.
That’s what the subtitle of the movie (“The Burden of Black Genius”) is about. Sly, on a basic level, destroyed his success with drugs, becoming a wastrel cocaine addict; after a while he seemed to vanish. But it’s one of the headier themes of the movie, explored in comments by Vernon Reid and André 3000 and D’Angelo and Nile Rogers, that Sly, having changed an art form by inventing what became the template for so much of the music of the ’70s, felt entrapped by his role as the Pied Piper of funk crossover. He was made vulnerable by his success in a way that (the film suggests) a white pop star would not have been, and he felt driven to escape it, doing so in the most dysfunctional way possible. Without making excuses for him, the movie explores the war in his soul.
He was, in every way, a giant: toweringly tall, if you count the Afro he wore like a crown, with that grandly toothy radiant dimpled grin, and he dressed like an alien pasha. As sexual as Mick Jagger, he took the bottom-heavy, on-the-beat DNA invented by James Brown and gave it wings, elevating funk by fusing it with pop and rock ‘n’ roll, until it was more thrilling than the sum of its parts. He put together a band that was Black and white and male and female, and this, in 1967, was so much more than a novelty (though on that score it was revolutionary), because when you listened to Sly and the Family Stone you could hear the radically diverse sensibilities of the band members jostling up next to each other, as if they were three bands at once, and then — miraculously — it all coalesced. They smashed down those walls. (Without Sly, there would be no Prince.)
Sly Stone, for all the grit of his aesthetic, had a joy he elevated into an ideology. We see a clip of Sly and the Family Stone performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and there’s Sly, going out into the audience on Ed fucking Sullivan, doing the hambone. This was an entertainer who could turn a variety show into church.
The story starts in 1964, when Sly (born Sylvester Stewart in 1943) is 21 and already a star D.J. in the Bay Area. His startling charisma shines through in every photograph, and a lot of what gives “Sly Lives!” its kinetic eagerness is the musical way that it weaves images together. The editing, by Joshua L. Pearson (who also cut “Summer of Soul”), is ace, but you always feel Questlove’s mash-up temperament at work. Sly rose through the multiplicity of his talent — he played every instrument there was and established himself in San Francisco as a singular producer and composer who knew how to coax the best out of any musician. (We hear a testimonial from Grace Slick, whose first group, the Great Society, recorded the original version of “Somebody to Love” with Sly as producer.)
But here’e the thing about Sly: His fusion of forms was so influential that it’s almost hard to hear now how radical it was then. Black artists and white artists, in the late ’60s, were thought of in separate silos, and Sly wanted to tear that down. Sly and the Family Stone’s first album, “A Whole New Thing,” was too ahead of its time to catch on (it was a commercial dud), and Sly was told that to save the band he needed to create a hit single. That song was “Dance to the Music,” which was dubbed “psychedelic soul” (because they had to call it something). Questlove deconstructs how it was built on top of a Motown beat, with those blaring acid horns, that chorus of voices sounding like a barbershop quartet hovering in space then singing in startling unison, the whole song finding its meaning in the thumping sonic drive that somehow remained…light. This was a whole new chemistry.
Stone took that magic synthesis to a higher and higher plane, which is what “I Want to Take You Higher” was about. The group’s performance of that song at Woodstock catapulted them into the stratosphere, and one paradox of the performance is that in 1969 it played as a fabulous anomaly (since Sly was one of the only Black headliners at Woodstock), but when you watch it now you see that he was the one inventing the music of the future. In his space-age spectacles, with a thick gold chain around his neck, he was saying that this was the sound of freedom. It was music to smash chains by. Nile Rogers recalls how in the early ’70s, when he belonged to the New York chapter of the Black Panthers, “Stand!,” with its ecstatic exhortation, was the Panthers’ supreme anthem. Yet it could have been anyone’s anthem. Sly had too generous a spirit to be a dogmatist.
Yet it’s around this time that the burden of Black genius kicks in. We see a telling clip of Sly on “The Dick Cavett Show,” where Cavett’s pesky questions are actually a veiled form of racist one-upmanship. And Sly, though he’s high as a kite at the time, knows that and refuses to kowtow to it. He has achieved a new kind of stardom, which the system feeds on and on some level doesn’t trust. And that only feeds Stone’s self-doubt, which he shrouds in a mountain of cocaine.
The album that came out of this period, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” was not a success but has been re-evaluated as a bad-vibe masterpiece of raw undiluted funk truth. I can’t sign on to that (to me, it’s always sounded like a middling Prince record), but even buried in the morass is a gem. “Family Affair” is not only a great song but the first — ever — to use a drum machine, by which I mean a primitive toy of a synthesizer that had rhythm buttons marked “samba” and “tango.” But Sly did something ingenious, playing those chintzy drum samples off the beat, massaging them into something revelatory.
Sly’s descent was severe. He was arrested on drug charges multiple times, and he went to jail. George Clinton, interviewed in the film, says that the two were crackheads together. More than that, Sly was kind of forgotten. He became a scandalous footnote to the era that he’d helped create. I assumed he’d so bottomed out that he’d become a shard of a human being, but the movie shows you that’s not true. We see extended clips from an interview he gave to Maria Shriver in 1982, and he’s still got those angelic eyes, that captivating aura, and he’s compellingly forthright. He even tried to make a go of it musically in the MTV era but flopped. We see him in 1993, looking healthier than you’d expect at his group’s induction into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. And there are photographs of him today, looking old and grizzled (he’s 81), with his adult children, who for all the madness seem to adore him. He is not interviewed in the film, and that works perfectly. It preserves his mystique.
The movie includes a great story, from the producer/ composer Jimmy Jam, about how he and his partner, Terry Lewis, were in the middle of recording “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814” when he was in a restaurant and onto the speaker system came “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again),” with its epochal thumping and plucking bass — in 1969, a revelatory sound rising out of the primordial funk. Then and there, Harris decided to build the album’s title track around a six-second sample from “Thank You.” Sly Stone’s great creative period lasted four, maybe five years. Then he was done. But even after he went away, he was still there. That’s the documentary’s upshot, as Questlove asks us to look at a fallen genius and hear the eternal.
