“Sly lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)” is a dazzling and definitive funk-pop documentary. It’s the other one”yes” directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, and he’s upped the ante from his first, “Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” — though that lyrical throwback to 1969-in-Harlem- the concert was beautiful in its own way In “Sly Lives!”, Questlove confronts the life and legacy of Sly stoneexamining it, holding it up to the light, tearing it apart and putting 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, feel it and think it, know how it was made and hear how its vibrations went out into the world. This is a film made by a maestro musician and DJ turned master director.
Full of penetrating interviews and extraordinary archival footage, “Cunning Life!” is a film that knows how to take the time to meditate on what it shows you. Yet much of it proceeds in a kaleidoscopic way that tickles your eyes and ears. That’s because Questlove, while maintaining a classic journalistic documentary tradition, works furiously to get it all in – the big, extraordinary story of how Sly Stone, beginning in the late ’60s, became the rock star of his moment and broke through boundaries of sound and image, scaling the top of a new kind of black fame, to the point where he had nowhere else to go but down. And he did. Dramatically.
That’s what the film’s subtitle (“The Burden of Black Genius”) is about. Sly, at a basic level, destroyed his success with drugs and became a profligate cocaine addict; after a while he seemed to disappear. But it’s one of the film’s main themes, explored in commentary 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 trapped 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 compelled to escape it, and did so in the most dysfunctional way possible. Without making excuses for him, the film explores the war in his soul.
He was, in every way, a giant: mighty tall, if you count the afro he wore like a crown, with that magnificent toothy beaming 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 exciting 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 (although it was revolutionary in that respect), because listening to Sly and the Family Stone you could hear the radically different emotions of the band members pushing up next to each other, as if they were three bands at once, and then – miraculously – it all melted together. They knocked those walls down. (Without Sly, there would be no prince.)
Sly Stone, for all his aesthetics, had a joy he elevated to an ideology. We see a clip of Sly and the Family Stone performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and there’s Sly walking out into the audience on Ed damn Sullivanmake ham bone. This was an entertainer who could turn a variety show into a church.
The story begins in 1964, when Sly (born Sylvester Stewart in 1943) is 21 and already a star DJ in the Bay Area. His astonishing charisma shines through in every photograph, and much of what makes “Sly Lives!” its kinetic fervor is the musical way of weaving together images. The editing, by Joshua L. Pearson (who also cut “Summer of Soul”), is cool, but you can always sense Questlove’s mash-up temperament at work. Sly rose through the diversity of his talent – he played every instrument available and established himself in San Francisco as an outstanding producer and composer who knew how to bring out the best in any musician. (We hear a testimony from Grace Slick, whose first group, the Great Society, recorded the original version of “Somebody to Love” with Sly as producer.)
But here’s the thing about Sly: His fusion of forms was so influential that it’s almost hard to hear now how radical it was back 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 called “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 that sound like a barbershop quartet floating in space and then singing in startling unison, the whole song finding its meaning in the pounding sound drive which somehow remained … light. This was a completely new chemistry.
Stone took that magical synthesis to a higher and higher plane, which is what “I Want to Take You Higher” was all about. The group’s performance of that song at Woodstock catapulted them into the stratosphere, and a paradox of the performance is that in 1969 it played as a stunning 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 who invented the music of the future. In his space-age glasses, with a thick gold chain around his neck, he said so this was the sound of freedom. It was music to break chains. Nile Rogers recalls how in the early ’70s, when he belonged to the New York chapter of the Black Panthers, “Stand!”, with its ecstatic call, was the Panthers’ loudest anthem. Still, it could have been anyone’s anthem. Sly had too generous a spirit to be a dogmatist.
Yet it is around this time that the burden of black genius begins. We see a talking clip of Sly on “The Dick Cavett Show,” where Cavett’s annoying questions are actually a veiled form of racial slur. And Sly, even though he’s high as a dragon at the time, knows it and refuses to go along with it. He has achieved a new kind of stardom, which the system feeds off of and on some level doesn’t trust. And that only fuels 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 hit but has been re-evaluated as a bad-vibe masterpiece of raw undiluted funk truth. I can’t sign off on it (to me it’s always sounded like an average 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 labeled “samba” and “tango.” But Sly did something genius, played those chintzy drum samples of the beat, massaging them into something revealing.
Sly’s ancestry was serious. He was arrested several times on suspicion of drugs and he ended up in prison. George Clinton, interviewed in the film, says the two were smitten. More than that, Sly was kind of forgotten. He became a scandalous footnote to the era he had helped create. I assumed that he had achieved so much that he had become a shard of a human being, but the movie shows you that is not true. We see extended clips from an interview he gave to Maria Shriver in 1982, and he still has those angelic eyes, that captivating aura, and he’s convincingly blunt. He even tried to tackle it musically during the MTV era but flopped. We see him in 1993, looking healthier than one might expect at his group’s induction into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. And there are photographs of him today, looking old and gray (he’s 81), with his grown children, who, despite all the craziness, seem to adore him. He is not interviewed in the film, and it works perfectly. It preserves his mystique.
The film includes a great story, from 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 at a restaurant and into the speaker system came “Thank You ( Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)”, with its epochal pounding and plucking bass – in 1969 a revealing sound emerges from the primal 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 passed away, he was still there. That’s the documentary’s result, when Questlove asks us to look at a fallen genius and hear the eternal.
