{"id":10040565,"date":"2025-01-27T05:38:22","date_gmt":"2025-01-27T10:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/?p=10040565"},"modified":"2025-01-27T11:42:42","modified_gmt":"2025-01-27T16:42:42","slug":"sundance-2025-sly-lives-thanks-sly-stone-for-being-himself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/2025\/01\/27\/sundance-2025-sly-lives-thanks-sly-stone-for-being-himself\/","title":{"rendered":"Sundance 2025: ‘SLY LIVES!’ thanks Sly Stone for being himself"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Editor\u2019s Note<\/strong>: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is once again out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Check out our preview of the 2025 festival<\/a>; keep it locked to our full coverage of\u00a0Sundance reviews<\/a>\u00a0from this year\u2019s festival as they go live, and check out our\u00a0full archives of past editions<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ahmir \u201cQuestlove\u201d Thompson reminds me a lot of Bo Jackson. Sure, you can\u2019t go out and absolutely mow down defenders in\u00a0Tecmo Bowl<\/em>\u00a0with the long-time drummer for The Roots, but you can see how a multi-sport athlete like Jackson resembles a multimedia artist like Questlove. Jackson had football, baseball, track and field, and more \u2013 \u201cBo Knows\u201d literally everything (except for Diddley, that is) \u2013 and Thompson has drumming, DJ-ing, writing, and filmmaking. If he started doing sculpture, I\u2019m sure he\u2019d probably be great at it. Yet he\u2019s like Bo in the way that he lets his performance speak for itself: He\u2019s comfortable in collaborative environments, the steady beat for everyone else to shine over, but when he breaks out, you can\u2019t help but pay attention. He\u2019s not a Deion Sanders, as skilled as he was, because he just doesn\u2019t court or demand one\u2019s gaze with theatrics: He\u2019s Bo, casually breaking bats over his thighs like they were toothpicks. This is why directing is such a good fit for him \u2013 it gives him a chance to synthesize everything he loves and all of the knowledge he\u2019s accumulated \u2013 in a way that draws people in and amazes them, even as he\u2019s not the focus. His latest,\u00a0SLY LIVES!<\/strong><\/em>, is an affectionate portrait of the one and only Sylvester Stewart, whose personal contributions to pop, soul, and rock music live on in ways obvious (sampling) and subtle (drum machines!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stewart was, of course, best known as Sly Stone, leader of Sly and the Family Stone, but his music career started much earlier than that \u2013 by the time he was 22, he\u2019d produced gold records for the likes of the Beau Brummels, Bobby Freeman and The Great Society, Grace Slick\u2019s band\u00a0before\u00a0<\/em>Jefferson Airplane. But once he gathered together a bunch of his Bay Area friends, some of whom he grew up with, others who he knew from his job as a DJ at one of San Francisco\u2019s radio stations, he became the face of a sound that would fully and totally change our perception of what popular music could be. Like defensive linemen in\u00a0Tecmo Bowl,\u00a0<\/em>Sly and the Family Stone juked easy categorizations \u2013 they weren\u2019t just R&B or soul, they weren\u2019t just rock, they weren\u2019t just funk \u2013 they were themselves and became absurdly popular. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were a bright, joyful group who had the fortune of emerging at one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, and for a good long while, Sly rose to the challenge. He made music that brought people together until he fell apart. Like other artists of his era, Stone got caught up in drugs as a coping mechanism, and his attempts to shake up his image \u2013 or preserve his popularity \u2013 following the dissolution of the Family Stone in the mid-’70s went tits-up. Yet the film is titled\u00a0SLY LIVES!<\/em>, after all, so the tone is one of celebration: Sure, this man went through some shit, but\u00a0look what he did for all of us<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film\u2019s insights are given to us through a remarkable set of interviews, the aspect of Questlove\u2019s films that makes them so novel compared to his peers. Other docs can illustrate musical concepts in similar, easy-to-understand ways, much like how he does here, and anyone can recite biographical details and cut together stock footage provided they have the drive to do so and iMovie. One can\u2019t easily get each talking head assembled for their chorus to gleam with enthusiasm and candor when reflecting on their (actual or imagined) relationship with an icon. You can\u2019t simply pry out of Nile Rodgers a reflection on what \u201cStand\u201d did for the morale of the group of Black Panthers he was a member of in Harlem, nor can you make a dreamy-eyed D\u2019Angelo recite the lyrics of \u201cRunnin\u2019 Away,\u201d savoring the potency of the words as he speaks them (though you could probably get George Clinton to be as funny as he is here when he talks about Sly and his days doing drugs while touring with Parliament). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you pair this conversational ability with propulsive editing, you get moments like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis recounting how they came up with \u201cRhythm Nation\u201d for Janet Jackson from a Sly sample they heard at lunch. In\u00a0separate\u00a0<\/em>interviews, Jam and Lewis start to hum the sample, and Questlove cross-cuts quickly between them, building up to the full emergence of the song and its iconic music video. It\u2019s genuinely remarkable shit, a moment that could pry a smile out of the most dejected audience member.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This brings us to the film\u2019s subtitle\u00a0The Burden of Black Genius<\/em>, which is abruptly (and rudely) introduced early on when an interviewer asks Sly how it felt to go from the Top of the Pops to the bottom of the barrel within a decade (those words aren\u2019t exact, but man, it feels like a slap in the face even second-hand). Thompson wants to know what it is about success for Black artists that causes them to burn out so quickly \u2013 is it the public\u2019s attitudes towards label-defying or political behavior by Black entertainers (\u201cShut up and play,\u201d etc)? Why can David Bowie change, but Sly can\u2019t? Is it the difficulty that a code-switching artist like Stone feels when he travels between cultural styles and norms, one that makes him feel like an alien in both his community and with the ones he engages with? The answers, as you might expect, are reasonable, rooted in cultural context and the grand sweep of history, yet they remain unsatisfactory \u2013 not because they aren\u2019t\u00a0right<\/em>, but because of how pernicious and inescapable the trap seems to be for Black geniuses, and how much one wishes that we could change things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As several interviewees mention, it\u2019s success that is the real peril for Black artists: Failure, at least, brings a kind of freedom from expectation with it, while becoming an icon foists a burden upon the artist \u2013 one that Black artists have an even harder time trying to shake than anyone else in American culture. It\u2019s a quagmire that no one can answer completely \u2013 all we can do is mourn those lost to it and celebrate those, like Sly, who endure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is once again out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Check out our preview of the 2025 festival; keep it locked to our full coverage of\u00a0Sundance reviews\u00a0from this year\u2019s festival as they go live, and check out our\u00a0full archives of past editions. Ahmir \u201cQuestlove\u201d Thompson reminds me a lot of Bo Jackson. Sure, you can\u2019t go out and absolutely mow down defenders in\u00a0Tecmo Bowl\u00a0with the long-time drummer for The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":10040546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19452],"tags":[26409,2823,35313,35321,21272,35309,11434],"class_list":["post-10040565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-filmtv","tag-header","tag-questlove","tag-sly-lives","tag-sly-stone","tag-sundance","tag-sundance-2025","tag-sundance-film-festival"],"yoast_head":"\nSundance 2025: 'SLY LIVES!' thanks Sly Stone for being himself<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"'SLY LIVES!' is an affectionate portrait of 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