Get the latest gossip
‘Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)’ Review: Questlove’s Sly Stone Doc Is Dazzling and Definitive
Questlove's second documentary levels up from "Summer of Soul," exploring Sly Stone's life and legacy in a kaleidoscopic and profound way.
That’s because Questlove, while hewing to a classical journalistic documentary tradition, is working furiously to get it all in — the vast, extraordinary story of how Sly Stone, starting in the late ’60s, became the rock star of his moment, smashing through boundaries of sound and image, scaling the peak of a new kind of Black fame, to the point that he had nowhere to go but down. But it’s one of the headier themes of the movie, explored in comments by Vernon Reid and André 3000 and D’Angelo and Nile Rogers, that Sly, having changed an art form by inventing what became the template for so much of the music of the ’70s, felt entrapped by his role as the Pied Piper of funk crossover. The movie includes a great story, from the producer/ composer Jimmy Jam, about how he and his partner, Terry Lewis, were in the middle of recording “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814” when he was in a restaurant and onto the speaker system came “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again),” with its epochal thumping and plucking bass — in 1969, a revelatory sound rising out of the primordial funk.
Or read this on Variety