After earning a 2022 Oscar for Best Documentary Film with his directorial debut, ‘Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)’, Philadelphia native Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson—co-founder of The Roots and drummer for The Tonight Show band—was undoubtedly ready for an encore.
Instead of one encore, Questlove gave us two.
First is the freshly-released film, the NBC documentary ‘Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music‘, to coincide with the 50th anniversary celebration of ‘Saturday Night Live‘, and secondly, this week’s ‘Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius),’ is a study of Sly & Family Stone and Black music innovators such as Andre 3000 and D’Angelo.
Questlove’s ‘Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music’ doc features footage of the program’s storied live performances, from the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Run DMC and more, and can currently be streamed on Peacock. ‘Sly Lives!’ is available for streaming on Hulu.
“When we did ‘Summer of Soul‘, Ahmir and I came from the same starting point — we both knew and loved most of its artists,” says Questlove’s filmmaking partner, Oscar-winning producer Joseph Patel, talking about that 2021 documentary’s list of stars such as Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & the Pips and more.
“With ‘Sly Lives!’, it was Quest who held great importance for Sly Stone,” notes Patel. “That was one of Ahmir’s longtime favorites and one of his most influential artists.”
Sly Stone (born Stewart) is a San Francisco psychedelic-era radio DJ turned composer, singer, and musician who revolutionized music with Sly & the Family Stone — a multi-racial, genre-blending band that shattered boundaries between Black and White audiences. With soul-rock-funk-pop crossover hits like ‘Stand!’, ‘Everyday People’, ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’, and ‘Thank You’, the group left an indelible mark on music history. The latter track, in particular, became a widely sampled staple of 1980s and ‘90s hip-hop, as highlighted in a fast-cut segment of ‘Sly Lives!’ where producers Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam discuss its influence on Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation.’
Questlove told Billboard magazine that Sly Stone was “essentially” the first Black megastar. “Sly is basically the he embodiment of what Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech was about, like this utopian multiracial mix of Black and whites, men and women together.”
Patel goes on to say that he, however, didn’t know Sly’s discography in order, but did know those Family Stone hits, as well as the decline of Sly Stone that followed – the drug addiction, the arrests, the manner in which he missed live concerts and recording dates, and allowed his career to slip away.
“I knew how he tried to win back his fame, that he was a junkie and lived in a camper,” says Patel. “The challenge for me was to become fluent so as to best tell his story and use his life and work as an avatar for this larger idea: the burden of Black genius.”
Questlove told Deadline that Sly’s undoing at his own hands was “the point of this whole film about self-sabotage. But he wrote the alphabet, and we’re still writing books from that alphabet to this day.”
When it comes to the present day, and the ‘Sly’ documentary’s take on the idea of Black genius, Questlove spoke to Black music innovators Vernon Reid, Q-Tip, Chaka Khan, André 3000, and, most particularly D’Angelo — artists whose earliest works broke down barriers of what it means to make Black music, and had issues with how to move forward with the weight of expectation put upon them.
“Can you imagine Sly after having just headlined Woodstock, being on the cover of Rolling Stone, having Black and White America are both looking to you as if you just solved race relations through your music—what pressure that must have been for him?,” asks Patel. “Connecting the stories of Sly and everyone else in the film came down to Ahmir’s own experiences with fame.”
