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Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson reminds me a lot of Bo Jackson. Sure, you can’t go out and absolutely mow down defenders in Tecmo Bowl with the long-time drummer for The Roots, but you can see how a multi-sport athlete like Jackson resembles a multimedia artist like Questlove. Jackson had football, baseball, track and field, and more – “Bo Knows” literally everything (except for Diddley, that is) – and Thompson has drumming, DJ-ing, writing, and filmmaking. If he started doing sculpture, I’m sure he’d probably be great at it. Yet he’s like Bo in the way that he lets his performance speak for itself: He’s comfortable in collaborative environments, the steady beat for everyone else to shine over, but when he breaks out, you can’t help but pay attention. He’s not a Deion Sanders, as skilled as he was, because he just doesn’t court or demand one’s gaze with theatrics: He’s Bo, casually breaking bats over his thighs like they were toothpicks. This is why directing is such a good fit for him – it gives him a chance to synthesize everything he loves and all of the knowledge he’s accumulated – in a way that draws people in and amazes them, even as he’s not the focus. His latest, SLY LIVES!, is an affectionate portrait of the one and only Sylvester Stewart, whose personal contributions to pop, soul, and rock music live on in ways obvious (sampling) and subtle (drum machines!).
Stewart was, of course, best known as Sly Stone, leader of Sly and the Family Stone, but his music career started much earlier than that – by the time he was 22, he’d produced gold records for the likes of the Beau Brummels, Bobby Freeman and The Great Society, Grace Slick’s band before Jefferson Airplane. But once he gathered together a bunch of his Bay Area friends, some of whom he grew up with, others who he knew from his job as a DJ at one of San Francisco’s radio stations, he became the face of a sound that would fully and totally change our perception of what popular music could be. Like defensive linemen in Tecmo Bowl, Sly and the Family Stone juked easy categorizations – they weren’t just R&B or soul, they weren’t just rock, they weren’t just funk – they were themselves and became absurdly popular.
They were a bright, joyful group who had the fortune of emerging at one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, and for a good long while, Sly rose to the challenge. He made music that brought people together until he fell apart. Like other artists of his era, Stone got caught up in drugs as a coping mechanism, and his attempts to shake up his image – or preserve his popularity – following the dissolution of the Family Stone in the mid-’70s went tits-up. Yet the film is titled SLY LIVES!, after all, so the tone is one of celebration: Sure, this man went through some shit, but look what he did for all of us.
The film’s insights are given to us through a remarkable set of interviews, the aspect of Questlove’s films that makes them so novel compared to his peers. Other docs can illustrate musical concepts in similar, easy-to-understand ways, much like how he does here, and anyone can recite biographical details and cut together stock footage provided they have the drive to do so and iMovie. One can’t easily get each talking head assembled for their chorus to gleam with enthusiasm and candor when reflecting on their (actual or imagined) relationship with an icon. You can’t simply pry out of Nile Rodgers a reflection on what “Stand” did for the morale of the group of Black Panthers he was a member of in Harlem, nor can you make a dreamy-eyed D’Angelo recite the lyrics of “Runnin’ Away,” savoring the potency of the words as he speaks them (though you could probably get George Clinton to be as funny as he is here when he talks about Sly and his days doing drugs while touring with Parliament).
When you pair this conversational ability with propulsive editing, you get moments like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis recounting how they came up with “Rhythm Nation” for Janet Jackson from a Sly sample they heard at lunch. In separate interviews, Jam and Lewis start to hum the sample, and Questlove cross-cuts quickly between them, building up to the full emergence of the song and its iconic music video. It’s genuinely remarkable shit, a moment that could pry a smile out of the most dejected audience member.
This brings us to the film’s subtitle The Burden of Black Genius, which is abruptly (and rudely) introduced early on when an interviewer asks Sly how it felt to go from the Top of the Pops to the bottom of the barrel within a decade (those words aren’t exact, but man, it feels like a slap in the face even second-hand). Thompson wants to know what it is about success for Black artists that causes them to burn out so quickly – is it the public’s attitudes towards label-defying or political behavior by Black entertainers (“Shut up and play,” etc)? Why can David Bowie change, but Sly can’t? Is it the difficulty that a code-switching artist like Stone feels when he travels between cultural styles and norms, one that makes him feel like an alien in both his community and with the ones he engages with? The answers, as you might expect, are reasonable, rooted in cultural context and the grand sweep of history, yet they remain unsatisfactory – not because they aren’t right, but because of how pernicious and inescapable the trap seems to be for Black geniuses, and how much one wishes that we could change things.
As several interviewees mention, it’s success that is the real peril for Black artists: Failure, at least, brings a kind of freedom from expectation with it, while becoming an icon foists a burden upon the artist – one that Black artists have an even harder time trying to shake than anyone else in American culture. It’s a quagmire that no one can answer completely – all we can do is mourn those lost to it and celebrate those, like Sly, who endure.