Sly Lives! (a.k.a. The Burden of Black Genius)

With Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s first documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival, Summer of Soul, the multiracial rock, R&B, and funk band Sly and the Family Stone stood out as an iconic force of musical and cultural change in the late 1960s. Sly Lives! picks up that story and offers a thorough examination of the band and its eponymic musical genius, Sly Stone—from his early days as a disc jockey and multi-instrumentalist studio musician to the height of his fame and eventual destruction through drugs and alcohol. More than a music documentary or bio-doc of one of the most successful bands of the 1960s and 1970s, the film interrogates the personal and professional costs that artistic success exacted from Stone, especially when no roadmap existed for how he should navigate the pressures and anxieties of being an artistic first. As Thompson demonstrates through interviews with an array of contemporary artists speaking to the “burden of Black genius,” we must understand the pressures, fears, and anxieties that accompany groundbreaking Black artists such as Stone if we hope to understand their public lives and their humanity.  For a joyful yet also melancholy exploration of one popular music’s undisputed geniuses, Sly Lives! wins a Peabody.