Questlove returns to our screens with another banging music doc, and the second this month, with his investigation of the genius that is Sly Stone. We begin in the 60s in the Bay Area where this gangly multi-talented multi-instrumentalist is DJ'ing across genre-lines. Pretty soon Sly forms a band that will cross colour and gender-lines and make some of the most iconic funk tracks of the late 60s and early 70s. These are tracks that suffused by childhood on my parents' vinyl and then dominated the airwaves when sampled by the artists who decorated our walls and filled our bedrooms in the 80s - from Prince to Public Enemy.
Musical talent from Andre 3000 to Chaka Khan to Nile Rodgers to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis are on hand to tell us just why Sly and the Family Stone's tracks were so gripping and so continuously influential. They are interspersed with archive footage of the band rehearsing and playing, and contemporaneous interviews with Sly. We see a man who is evidently a musical genius and demanding of his collaborators. A man whose progressive message and musical style were overtaken when the 70s turned bad. And a man who ultimately wasted his talent on decades of drug abuse. He could have become an influential producer himself - like Nile Rodgers.
Questlove's message is ultimately hopeful. Sly Lives! through every artist influenced by him today. But I wasn't convinced by his thesis that there is something uniquely difficult and burdensome about black genius. The film argues that black artists are disposable commodities for a cruel entertainment industry and still predominantly white audience. But having just watched heartbreaking documentaries about Boyzone and Robbie Williams (and I am NOT claiming equivalence of genius), I think the perils and pitfalls and exploitation are endemic in the industry no matter the colour of the artist.
SLY LIVES! AKA THE BURDEN OF BLACK GENIUS has a running time of 112 minutes. It was released on Hulu earlier this week.
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