Sly Lives!
★★★★
Hulu/Disney+
Late into Sly Lives!, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s thoughtful documentary about the explosive brilliance of Sly Stone and the band he built, the drummer and filmmaker poses a provocative question to his assembled celebrities: “Is there a burden on Black genius?” Nearly two hours earlier, the film begins with a fruitless quest to define that term before implicitly offering Stone as one possible answer: a charismatic multi-instrumental wonder who channelled the fractures and possibilities of the late ’60s into anthems that recombined most everything. D’Angelo -who emerges as a kind of one-man Greek chorus, so crucial for Sly Lives! - is the first to answer: “You do have to do it for everyone, and everybody else’s success rides on your success.”
Thompson’s film does not shy away from such larger cultural vexations and social quandaries, be they racism, addiction, privilege, or mental health disorders. The basics of Stone’s story, after all, can seem like the standard fare of rock star rise-and-fall: a spirited kid with religious roots slips into the psychedelic scene of San Francisco, builds a mighty band with flair and finesse, and then succumbs to the excesses of success but somehow survives to become a grinning grandfather. (Stone, 81, is not interviewed, but Thompson does use recent candid photos of him, proof that his smile still electrifies.) Thompson does not pretend there are easy answers or ready fixes but instead lets his worries unspool into the present, crossing out the eyes of Black artists like Lauryn Hill and Dave Chapelle onscreen as Vernon Reid asks, “Who do you think you are? What do you think you’re doing?” In 2025 in the United States, those points retain a cruel power - and afford Sly Lives! a bittersweet staying power.
Sly Lives! taps Thompson’s deep roster, with the reclusive likes of D’Angelo and André 3000 joining George Clinton, Chaka Khan, and a half-dozen members of the Family Stone or Stone’s actual family. Thompson deploys them not just to analyse Stone’s story but also his revolutionary music, which slipped protest messages into irrepressible party anthems.
Thompson lifts the curtains on the seemingly interminable takes of Everyday People, while Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis dig into the inner-workings of its hook after explaining the mechanics of the meter in Dance to the Music. Q-Tip and Thompson lean over a sampler, nodding their heads as they excise a Family Stone drum beat and explain how those rhythms became hip-hop’s vertebrae. Sly Lives! plays for the heads as well as those simply looking for a story that’s poignant and thoughtful.
“I hate to say it, but these white rock ’n’ rollers, the motherfuckers go out in style,” D’Angelo says near the end, long after Q-Tip suggests that Stone and Black stars like him never received the same reinventive leeway as, say, David Bowie. “They die in their tomato garden with their grandson, laughing and shit … That’s what we’re supposed to be doing.” Sly Lives! is a true celebration of the hybridized music Stone made and a relentless rebuke of the systems that then made him suffer for it. It is the rare music documentary with the vision to look beneath and around the sound, too.
What We Learnt From Sly Lives!
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Stone’s junior college music professor, Dave Froehlich, encouraged him to leave school: “You don’t need it anymore.”
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Stone produced and essentially arranged The Great Society’s Someone to Love, the precursor to the Jefferson Airplane hit.
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Saxophonist Jerry Martini was the member who told Stone it was time to start playing. “If we do a band,” Martini remembers saying, “we’ll all be famous.”
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Stand! inspired Nile Rodgers when he was a subsection leader for the Black Panther Party.
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“Is that Rhythm Nation?” Janet Jackson asked when she walked into the studio to find Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis sampling Stone. They all agreed it was.
Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden Of Black Genius) is streaming now on Hulu/Disney+
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