By the halfway point of Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s 2021 documentary about the epochal-then-forgotten Harlem Cultural Festival, you think you’ve seen everything, and then—just when they’ve kept the crowd waiting long enough that people have grown restless, pushing and shoving—out come Sly and the Family Stone, to play a version of “Sing a Simple Song” that starts as a lazy tune-up jam and ends as a wave crashing over everybody’s heads, wiping out everything that’s come before it. It’s 1969, and suddenly the revolution teased in the film’s title seems to have pulled up like a magic bus, in the form of a multiracial, gender-integrated hippie-soul-rock band spreading the good news about the dawn of a “neo-super-Blackness” (as the late critic and Summer talking head Greg Tate puts it in the film.) “My group of four guys, we were suit-and-tie guys,” festival attendee Daryl Lewis puts it in the film. “Then we saw Sly. And we were no longer suit-and-tie guys anymore.”
In Questlove’s latest film, Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), Andre 3000 suggests that Sly “opened the portal” for countless other visionary artists, and that’s what that ‘69 footage from Mount Morris Park looks like—an artist full of fire, conjuring the future of music out of the summer air. Even if you know what happened to Sly after that—drugs and paranoia, endless tours with shows that started later and later or not at all, stoned talk-show appearances, one more bleak masterpiece of an album, then a slow fade into the shadows—this scene leaves you wondering how anyone with Sly’s gifts could have failed to live out the promise of that moment and the music that led up to it, how he could unlock chakras for everyone from Miles Davis to the Temptations (and eventually Prince and the Revolution, and later so many others) but not quite walk through the portal himself. Summer leaves that question hanging; Sly Lives! offers an answer.
Or maybe a few answers. One explanation is cocaine, which shows up as a supporting character in the film circa Woodstock and quickly becomes a co-lead. One minute the band is living out its utopian vision, singing “Dance to the Music” on Ed Sullivan while Sly struts into the audience to dance the hambone in a fringed vest and Cuban-link choker; then in 1970 he’s partying with Ike Turner, replacing departed drummer Greg Errico with a chintzy electronic percussion machine called the Maestro, and making There’s a Riot Goin’ On—a harrowing triumph, funk half-drowned in moral murk, the sound of ‘60s optimism curdled and Sly retreating into the shadows of his own guilt and pessimism like Kane behind Xanadu’s gates. He’s basically played out his string as an artist by age 30, but Sly does still live—although he lacks the motor functions to speak on camera, he turns 82 in March. (“He’s like a standard old Black man,” his adult daughter, the KCRW DJ Novena Carmel, reports in the film; he likes pizza, cars and Western movies.)
Thompson’s film does the standard rise-and-fall music-doc narrative as well as anybody and with more musicianly, crossfading panache than most, but he also steps outside it to chase a bigger idea, marshalling a chorus of latter-day artists to speak from experience about why Black geniuses like Sly seem more vulnerable to collapse and self-negation. So we get Andre 3000 addressing the separation anxiety that comes with leaving the hood behind, Q-Tip on the defensive impulse to come out hard and mean after pop success, and—most indelibly, telling his own story in a way that says everything about Sly—Thompson’s old muse D’angelo, another skyrocket of a performer who ended up retreating from the expectations of his audience and for a while seemed unlikely to return. Holding a dead cigarette, eyes bright but haunted, he talks about how everything you carry with you into the spotlight as a Black artist can end up destroying you: “The hang-ups, baggage, guilt and pain and shame that comes with it…If you don’t know how to handle it, if you don’t have your soul centered, it can be unbearable, man. It’ll turn you into an unwilling participant, and that’s equivalent to Hell.”
Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) is now streaming on Hulu.
