‘Sly Lives!’ is More Than Just Questlove’s Doc on Sly Stone. It’s a Funked-Up Look at Genius

The song titles alone evoke a sense of joy, excitement, community: “Dance to the Music,” “Stand!”, “Everyday People,” “Sing a Simple Song,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” “Everybody Is a Star.” (That last one was also the headline of its creator’s Rolling Stone cover story.) You know every one of these tracks. Trust us. If you’re not automatically singing their hooks — “Diff-rent/Strokes!/For diff-rent/Folks!” or “I-I-I-I/Love Ev-ery-day/People!” — or humming their melodies while reading the above list, then you’d recognize the band’s beats and grooves sampled by several generations of R&B and hip-hop innovators. Sly and the Family Stone were a multi-ethnic, multi-gender, multi-genre group when such concepts still seemed impossibly utopian on both the charts and the streets, led by a songwriter who deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as Mozart, Miles and McCartney. He was born Sylvester Stewart, adopted the name Sly Stone, revolutionized music several times over, and eventually became defined more by his absences than his stage presence.

Sly Lives!, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s documentary on the good life and hard times of a frontman and Family man that opened the Sundance Film Festival, wants to connect some dots for you. Yes, this profile of Stone covers everything from his stint as a radio personality in early ’60s San Francisco (KSOL, 1450 on your AM dial) to leading a collective that’d nearly steal Woodstock away from their rock & roll peers to, well, everything that happened after 1974. And like Thompson’s invaluable Summer of Soul (2021), which features the Family Stone’s red-hot performance at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Fair, it’s filled with clips of the band at their peak that double as funk-fueled testimonials. Should you somehow still doubt that they were groundbreaking, a dozen or so talking heads can attest in detail to the exact acres of ground they broke. It’s a music doc that takes its music-doc responsibilities seriously.

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But pay attention to the movie’s title, as well as the “a.k.a.” that follows it. Sly Lives! — that exclamation point is earned — knows it doesn’t need to sell you on dancin’ to the music. Yet Questlove & co. would like to put the complete story of the man behind it in context, as well as rescuing him from a narrative that puts its emphasis on the past few erratic decades. The “lives” part isn’t used lightly here, and speaks less to the fact that he’s still around in his 80s and more about the continual vibrancy of an overshadowed legacy. Sly the Slippery Recluse, known for blowing off gigs and and cracked public appearances, gets more ink than the six years between 1967 and 1973. Sly the Once-in-a-Generation Artist too often gets short shrift. (Even the memoir, published last year on Thompson’s literary imprint, feels slightly lopsided.) This doc sets the scales straight. It favors the albums themselves over the criminal record.

Not that it doesn’t peer directly into the There’s a Riot Going On-era of darkness — “Family Affair” may have that buoyant chorus, but take another listen to those lyrics — and the subtitle “The Burden of Black Genius” lets you know Questlove is after bigger game here. Having reached the sort of popularity that goes beyond crossover status and into the realm of the iconic, Stone is peaking when he decides to move operations from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. He’s also starting to buckle under the pressure, some of which come from his own self-sabotaging behavior, and others which comes from having to represent on a whole new stage. “There’s no blueprint for what comes next,” notes author and academic Mark Anthony Neal about Stone’s post-Woodstock moment. “There is no Black Elvis.”

Which gives Questlove the opportunity to pose a question. Stone was the first artist in his estimation to suffer the burden of having to do what he did while carrying a lot of baggage, at a level virtually unprecedented from other Black musicians of the day. Using that as a starting point, how does one define Black genius? He asks a version of this to D’Angelo, Q-Tip, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Nile Rogers, Chaka Khan, George Clinton, Vernon Reid and a number of other folks who are more than equipped to weigh in on the matter, but the doc cuts away before they answer. The one person who does get a chance to respond in the moment is André 3000, who counters “Do you believe in the concept of Black genius” with “I love it when it happens.”

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It’s a great way of both framing Sly’s accomplishments and, more importantly, reframing all of what he went through — and if anything, you wish Questlove leaned more into this concept from the POVs of others who have been blessed and burdened with the tag. Such grist for the chinstroking mill might have been better served outside of a single-subject profile doc, even as it enhances that very same doc; we’d watch a whole six-part series on the conversations that took place with the canon of fellow musical geniuses who get grilled here. The musical lessons they and too many others to count took from Sly are self-evident — more than one person echoes the sentiment that with no Sly and the Family Stone, there is no Prince and the Revolution. What did Sly’s flameout teach them? How did him becoming Black Elvis lead the way for others to walk their own pitfall-laden path?

Sly Lives! isn’t built to answer those queries, just to offer them up. It’s better set up to offer a treasure trove of insights and the opportunity to hear “Everyday People” evolve take after take. Knock-you-on-your-ass quotes are puchased in bulk: how “Stand!” builds to a “musical orgasm” (Jimmy Jam); how that album “was The Chronic for my parents’ generation” (Dream Hampton); how Sly may have been “higher than Georgia pine” on his Dick Cavett Show appearance, yet still beat the host at his smarty-pants game; and how Stone was “bringing people together at a time when this country was tearing itself apart” (Vernon Reid). The one that arguably sticks with you the most, however, belongs to Family Stone saxophonist Jerry Martini. “I was a white man trying to be Black,” he says. “[Sly] was a Black man trying to be everything.” The latter succeeded. It nearly killed him. But it also produced music that lives to this day. Questlove’s movie gives you both. For that, we echo our own Sly favorite’s title back to him: “Thank You.”