'Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)': How Sly Stone impacted artists Questlove, D'Angelo, Chaka Khan
"We're of similar age, we have very different backgrounds in terms of our upbringing, but we are hip-hop kids who knelt down on the dirty floor of a dusty record shop looking for records," Patel told Yahoo Canada about what makes his collaboration with Questlove so effective. "And in a lot of ways, I think this kind of filmmaking is similar to that. It's the same mentality."
Patel added that what's also appealing about Questlove's approach to filmmaking is that, even with all his success, "he is still a music fan."
"I met him in 1996 writing my first cover story for Rap Pages magazine on The Roots. ... I flew out to Philadelphia to interview him, ... and I had never met anyone like him," Patel shared. "He was Questlove of The Roots, but also, he was a music fan, and he nerded out over record reviews and magazines the same way me and my friends did."
"He's not a gatekeeper, when he learns something he wants to share that story with people. And I think that part of him has always been there, and I think it's the thing that really bonds us together."
Everyday People, Family Affair...you know the music, it's time to meet the man. Directed by #QuestLove, SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) comes to #DisneyPlusCA February 13. pic.twitter.com/7AggVZ0YuW
— Disney+ Canada 🇨🇦 (@DisneyPlusCA) February 13, 2025
As Patel's fellow producer, Derik Murray, highlighted, the impact of having Questlove, a music icon in his own right, lead the stars through the interviews for this film created a place of trust for them to not just open up about Stone, but their own lives.
"He brought comfort and trust," Murray told Yahoo Canada. "When he sat down with these folks, he wasn't stepping into that world a stranger, and ... he's being very honest about his own trials and tribulations with fame and success, and he is ... a genius in his own right."
"We spent a lot of time trying to figure out who to talk to, but we wanted them to be proxies for Sly," Patel said in a separate interview. "D'Angelo was hard. Even though him and Amir are really tight and have a lot of history, it took a year to get D'Angelo to sit on camera for us."
"We started talking about Sly, but he's really talking about himself, and those are, to me, my favourite parts of the movie. Those are the ones where you see the connection between Sly and these artists that he's ... influenced, but also who have sort of taken on the contours of his own experiences."
Sly Lives! begins with one impactful question, "What is Black genius?" Stated very clearly and directly, it's the question that we go on the journey of answering throughout the film.
"The movie opens with this montage of people contemplating the question, 'What is Black genius?' And the editing sleight of hand is that they're really struggling with the question, and ostensibly, the story of Sly is the answer to that question," Patel explained. "Here's an example of Black genius."
"But really they all answered that question, to some degree. It was not an unfamiliar question for them. ... I think Questlove asking that question would have solicited a different response."
But with any documentary, there's an element of wanting to serve the people who may know nothing about its subject, and those who are particularly informed.
"I want to find the sweet spot right between people who know a lot and people who are coming to it fresh, and you want to draw them in," Patel said. "I think one of the things we learned in making Summer of Soul is that sometimes you have to kill your darlings in service of the bigger idea, and we approached Sly very similarly."
"Even for those obsessives, there's stuff in this film that they have never seen or heard before. Sony gave us access to the vaults where we got to hear "Stan" take one. And "Everyday People" take one. ... But for everybody else, we wanted to give them the story, 'Oh you recognize these hits, here's the story of the ... person behind those hits.'"
As time progresses in the documentary, we get to understand the pressures Sly Stone as a pioneering successful Civil Rights Era Black artist, tasked with navigating the anxieties of his career.
In an interesting portion of the film, we get to the superstar's drug use and eventual time in rehab, but as we see the archival footage of Stone talking about his drug addiction and going to rehab, he doesn't have the vocabulary to talk about his trauma, or the understanding of generational trauma.
"We wanted to show how he was struggling to describe, really, what therapy was," Patel said. "He's facing the sort of the double whammy of being part of the late '60s hippie generation, but also being Black. And so in the conservative Reagan '80s, he's a prime target for for people to take joy in his downfall."
"And we were very careful, we didn't want to rob Sly of his agency. He made these choices. The last bite of the film, ... this interview he does with Maria Shriver that we use as a through line through the movie, he says, 'We get everything we deserve'. ... So he understands that he made these choices. ... We didn't want to get lost in the drug stories. We wanted to really spend time in the context around those stories and really how they were portrayed."
"He's a trailblazer, there's no road map for him to follow," Murray added in a separate interview. "I think from that standpoint, I think he felt trapped within his role as this Black artist, as this superstar."
"That's the beautiful part about the archive in this film, is we really get to hear from Sly firsthand, this journey that he was on, and I think that's what allows us to really start to feel like we're understanding what the stresses are, what the complications are, and we're seeing this incredible, epic success complicated by the factor that he's such a change-maker. ... In many ways, I think he was a target for many in the universe that were, quite frankly, racially motivated not to support an artist that had that vision."
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