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A “supernova” is a bright flare-up of light at the very end of a star’s life. NASA calls it “the brightest explosion that humans have ever seen,” and it can emit more energy in a few dying seconds than our sun will in billions of years. Then the star is gone. There’s no more light left to give. Like the celestial beings for which they’re named, the superstars who shine the brightest also seem destined for that inevitable burnout. We’ve all witnessed the tragic beauty of an artist / Supernova: Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Lauryn Hill, Kanye West, Prince, Jimi Hendrix… Once-in-a-lifetime talents who reach heights of success and influence people only dream of, and either push themselves past all sustainable levels attempting to maintain it, or do their best to destroy it. I believe the kids call it “crashing out.”
And when these artists crash out, we converge to ponder and debate their demise with friends, family, and followers as if we were personally impacted. On timelines, through podcast mics, blogs, group chats, barber shops, and hair salons. Why would they do that? Where are their people? Whose fault is it? Is it the “Illuminati?” We find ourselves compelled to dissect the public missteps of these people we don’t know because we care about them.= We believe we have ownership in their success; they’re out there representing for all of us! How could they do this to us? We listen, and we judge.
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson has worked with, played behind, musically directed, and collaborated with the most brilliant Black music talents of several generations as the bandleader of the Legendary Roots Crew, part of the neo-soul-shaping Soulquarians production collective, and musical director for The Tonight Show –only three of the innumerable hats he wears. The most brilliant talents, by default, include the most elusive, reclusive, and self-destructive. At this stage of a 30-plus year career that now spans music, film & TV, books, and even food, Thompson’s familiar with the discomfort of reaching rare air— like winning the Oscar for his directorial debut Summer of Soul in the immediate wake of fellow Philly native Will Smith, well, crashing out—-but at one point he was judging right along with us.
Until he started questioning instead.
His latest “Questlove Jawn” through Two One Five Entertainment, his production company with Roots front-man (and god of MC breath control) Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, challenges the cliché of the self-destructive artist through the story of Sly Stone; the first Black rock star whose legacy, until now, has been more about his vices than his brilliance.
Between their work as a band and individual projects, the Roots collective might be the most ubiquitous music group in the world. Their reputation for work ethic and professionalism hasn’t wavered in the 25 years they’ve enjoyed a mainstream level of success, so it’s understandable that for a time Thompson couldn’t wrap his mind around artists who just let it all go. “No one works harder than The Roots does, and the way I would be angry, like, ‘Dude, you had it all.’” Eventually, an experience prompted him to consider the trappings of success from a more philosophical angle. “We did one show in Italy with an unnamed artist who was kind of having a meltdown on the stage. And I was there judgmental. I was just like…’I would do anything to be in your position right now, and you have it!’ And it left me in a perpetual state of… is the grass always greener on the other side?”
As he thought about it, Thompson realized how ephemeral the “I made it” moment can be. “I (once) thought about, ‘Man, if I could just get a record deal.’ And then there was, ‘Alright, if we can go gold once.’ And then it was, ‘Just get one Grammy.’ All these things have happened. ’Man, if we played our hometown and it was a sold-out audience’. Like we’ve done everything. But I think because it came to us in a tortoise-and-the-hare type of way… whatever the victory lap was, cross(ing) the (finish) line, it was never that moment. So watching this act have some kind of a meltdown on stage really made me obsessed about whether the grass is greener on the other side, [and] if all that glitters is gold.”
Positive psychology expert Tal Ben-Shahar coined the term “arrival fallacy” to describe the delusion that hitting a large goal or achieving a singular success will be the key to one’s complete happiness and fulfillment. He names it as a reason so many celebrities struggle with their success. “These individuals start out unhappy, but they say to themselves, ‘It’s O.K. because when I make it, then I’ll be happy,’” he once explained to the NY Times. When they hit the sought-after peak but still feel a void, they can be left in a more dire state of mind than they were previously. “This time, they’re unhappy, but more than that they’re unhappy without hope.”
Lately, Thompson has been on a personal mission to prevent an eventual Supernova moment. It involves an ongoing process of unlearning and relearning beliefs, practices, and habits that were instilled in him as a Black person, a Black artist, and a product of the Hip-Hop generation. Crate digging is life, and he goes for deep cuts when something grabs his attention. He researches and reflects on connections and origin points, notes pattern recognition (one of the many lists in his Notes app is a surprising amount of legendary Black artists who either had absent mothers or turbulent maternal relationships), and even talks to scholars about historical context and references for our behaviors, our music, and our culture. Through his journey, Thompson realized that what most needed to be examined was our relationship with pain and how it drives us to both create and destroy.
“No one is trying to figure out or dissect…the mind state of someone when they’re creative. But me, I’m obsessed with that,” he explains. “I don’t think there’s any creative that isn’t living in imposter syndrome or that sort of thing…which is why I really wanted to tell the Sly story next.”
SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) follows the 2023 release of Stone’s memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again) through Thompson’s Auwa Books imprint and premieres this month at the Sundance Film Festival. The film is a transparent and in-depth look at Stone the person, not just his career arc. Sly Stone was an innovator whose influence from a decade-long peak is so broad that it wouldn’t be an understatement to say he shifted the sonic course of Black American music. Yet, Stone is rarely celebrated and acknowledged today outside of inner music circles. When he is remembered, his story is heavily truncated.
“Before I started the film, I just started with small focus groups. I went to my moms like ‘Alright, what do you think happened to Sly Stone?’ ‘Oh, man, he was such a genius. Then he started hanging with the wrong crowd and doing drugs.’” Thompson asked other people the same question and received variations of the same response, even from music mogul Clive Davis. Questlove realized he’d been asking the wrong question. “What I wanted to know is, and this is what’s addressed in the film, what’s happening in your life that makes drugs (the outlet)? Because the thing is, Black people have not been taught to have emotions.” He discovered the connections between enslaved people containing, suppressing, or performing certain emotions for survival and Black folks’ emotional trauma of today were key to understanding his own self-destructive habits (food and overwork) as well as those of his peers and idols.
“Because we have zero touch with our emotions, we know that happiness feels good, and then when something dark happens, we don’t know what to do, right? What gets me happy? This drink, this tattoo, this sexual release, (you’re a) shopaholic…we have so many vices that we go to. But it was important for me to kill the notion of just the drug addict to be the drug addict,” he explains. “Just doing drugs to be doing the drugs? Why? What does (the artist) feel inside? These are questions we don’t ask ourselves.”
Stone’s memoir, over a decade in the making, was the artist’s first opportunity (due in part to him getting sober in 2019) to tell his story in his own words. In turn, this documentary goes beyond that to ask, for the first time, how and why an artist of his creative caliber tears down his massive success and potential through destructive choices. But SLY LIVES! isn’t just about Sly.
“I’m the person that people come to when someone has a bad concert experience the night before with this particular artist, or if this particular artist gets arrested, or this particular artist dies, or this particular artist cancels a show, or is late to a show. [I’m also called when an artist] is decades between records and all those things, or does the complete opposite of what they’re known for,” Thompson explains. “I wanted to make the Sly story so I could stop being asked the question, ‘Why do we keep self-sabotaging?’”
As someone who prides myself on having a deeper-than-general knowledge of Black music, I knew little about Sly Stone except the top lines. I knew his music. I knew that The Family Stone was a barrier-breaking force as the first fully integrated mixed-race and mixed-gender rock band. I knew Stone was one of the founding fathers of the psychedelic soul movement.
Beyond that, I knew him as an enigmatic figure who, by my childhood, didn’t do interviews or many live performances—he largely retracted from public life in the late ‘80s. Oh, and I knew he had a raging drug habit which I understood to be largely responsible for his career decline and his reclusion. And I knew that he was a musical genius.
The standard definition of “genius” is “an exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability.” However, standard definitions rarely apply to Black folks in America. We are pushed to carry more than, while being viewed as less than, whatever the “standards” are.
Being a Black artist who changes a space, creates things that didn’t previously exist, and gains the attention and adoration of the masses comes with the added emotional tax of guilt, pressure, anxiety, and fear. For Black people, genius, success, and trauma are far too often a package deal.
“Ahmir had that idea; the subtitle of the film, ‘...the Burden of Black Genius.’ It’s the first thing he talked about when he talked about the Sly story.” Producer Joseph Patel, who was also Questlove’s creative partner for Summer of Soul, lays out the story beneath the story in the film. “He’s like, ‘Look, a lot of my peers have gone through this, and they self-sabotage.’ It’s because of this other thing that we don’t see, this invisible thing, invisible pressure that specifically Black artists—but really you can extrapolate it to all artists—go through. And that the public, especially in the age of social media, doesn’t really understand or appreciate or see.”
Stone was the ideal artist example because, in the music space, he’s Black Genius Zero. “(Ahmir’s) theory was that if you trace it back, Sly was really the first,” Patel goes on to explain. “There had been popular Black artists before him; obviously James Brown, Ray Charles, others. But Sly was the first to be positioned as a Black artist in a white mainstream rock world and at the top.”
Sylvester Stewart’s early story isn’t unique to Black artists of the ’60s: he was born into a musical family, honed his talents as a singer and multi-instrumentalist in the COGIC church as a young child, and was deemed a prodigy. If there was a single tipping point that set the eventual Sly Stone on a different course than his contemporaries, it was his family’s move from Denton, Texas to the San Francisco Bay Area. The diverse music landscape of mid-60s San Francisco opened him to opportunities—including establishing himself as a top-tier radio DJ and producing his first gold hits before reaching the age of 20—to a variety of emerging genres and styles, and a broader concept of possibilities for his art. Had Sylvester Stewart come of age in a different city, we probably wouldn’t have had this Sly Stone, which means we probably wouldn’t have had the same Parliament/Funkadelic. We wouldn’t have had Stevie Wonder’s five-album-run, or the same Rick James, or even the same Prince. The boundaries of popular Black music would have been more confined.
Funk legend George Clinton described his friend and peer as “… like seeing the Black version of The Beatles. He had the sensibility of the street, the church, and then, like, the qualities of a Motown, you know, Smokey Robinson – he was all of that in one person.” Once Sly and the Family Stone found their pocket with 1969’s Stand their rise was meteoric. By the time the band wrapped their 4:00 am Woodstock performance just four months after the LP’s release, Sly had reached icon status–not Black icon, rock ‘n’ roll icon. In theory, it’s a moment any artist would dream of. Stone, however, reveals through interview footage that it was “almost too much at once.” Behind the scenes, the cracks were already showing (Stone was hours late getting on stage for that very performance), and that’s where Questlove wants us to pay attention.
“If you were to ask me, ‘What is the Sly and the Family story about?’ This is literally every artist I’ve ever been associated with— and myself,” Thompson shared. “When you have everything you’ve ever wanted, what makes you just want to ruin it (snaps his fingers) in a snap?”
This film isn’t about a descent into addiction. It isn’t a chronicling of antics and scandals. It’s about what happens if and when the success artists worked so hard to attain becomes a type of prison. “When Sly does Woodstock, there’s a line that’s crossed, and there’s the one thing we don’t know how to deal with. It’s the feeling of guilt,” Questlove explains. “Like, what happens when you are white people’s favorite Black person?”
SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) hits on multiple areas; it’s a music doc, it’s also a Black culture doc, a historical doc…there’s even some psychology and sociology in the mix. The film is a case study in thorough storytelling, featuring a variety and abundance of rare rehearsal, performance, and interview footage (which Patel credits in part to story producer Jeff Mao, himself, and Thompson being crate diggers). It includes a lineup of original band members, characters from all eras of Stone’s story, insight from his children, plus footage of key players who are no longer here. Additionally, there’s a cast of voices that speak to Stone’s genius and impact but also intimately understand the layers and complexities of being Black geniuses themselves. Patel explains that they serve in part to speak for the doc’s subject, who doesn’t appear in the film. “If we were able to ask Sly and have him really be reflective and talk about those moments, what would he say? We couldn’t really ask Sly because of health concerns, and also because Sly in later years hasn’t really been reflective or chatty,” he shares. “But we could use proxies to answer; other artists who have been in similar situations.”
D’Angelo, Chaka Khan, André 3000, George Clinton, Vernon Reid, Q Tip, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, dream hampton, and Mark Anthony Neal help frame Stone’s story through prompts exploring the expectations and demands of Black artists: Why do they have to be multi-talented just to be seen? Do they have to represent all Black people all the time? How hard is it to be vulnerable? Is there a double standard for who’s allowed to evolve and who isn’t? Why might they use drugs to cope? And is there an extra burden on Black genius?
There’s also the unspoken detail that some of these artists pulled themselves out of the tailspin—George Clinton being bright-eyed, lucid, sober, active, and present in his 80s to reflect on his 40s is enough for me to do a praise lap around my living room—or managed to avoid it altogether. “D’Angelo, when he talks, he’s talking about him. But he could be talking about Sly,” Patel points out. “André decided to go the other route. He knew that if he continued rapping and doing something that his heart wasn’t in, he would probably end up in a bad place, so he took time off. He’s an example of a different decision made than what Sly did.”
Even for Questlove, though, getting artists to be vulnerable required some finesse. When I mention D’Angelo being one of the first artist interviews on camera and how I assume that placement was intentional, Thompson starts laughing before he can respond. “Oh. Dude. My favorite part of all the interviews, that you guys would not really catch up on, was always that minute when suddenly our eyes are locked and they realize, ‘I’m not here to talk about ‘Hot Fun In The Summertime.’” (Note: You can totally tell when D’Angelo has that moment of awareness.)
More people were asked to film who either declined or flaked. Thompson didn’t name names, nor did Patel. “Yeah, there are people that we asked to be in this and to talk about these themes, and they demonstrated in real-time the same behavior we (wanted) to talk to them about. I was angry, but Ahmir was like…’This is why we’re making the movie. This is exactly what we’re talking about.” Even without given names, you know Thompson’s resumé. You can probably guess.
SLY LIVES! is personal for Thompson, too. He knows the multiple, and often conflicting, demands that come with a high level of success. The anxiety and guilt over leaving parts of your community and identity behind, the need to prove you’re still you and still Black while meeting the expectations of broader audiences and markets. “You’ll feel guilty for a level of acceptance and success, and then you just start questioning yourself, like, ‘Am I really myself and is this how I feel? So what are they saying about me?’ And there’s our inability to not live in people-please mode,” he explains. “I think if anything, that was my challenge this year, the people-pleasing thing. I’m afraid to say ‘No.’ So a lot of that, ‘Oh, you work so hard’ thing. No, I just really have a hard time saying ‘Guys, this is way too much on my plate.’”
There’s also the imposter syndrome; that nagging inner narrative of unworthiness. When Stone’s “Running Away” (1971) comes up in the film, several of the artists interviewed remark on the darkness, but realness, of the lyrics: “Running away to get away, ha-ha ha-ha, you’re wearing out your shoes. Look at you foolin’ you.” For Questlove, this speaks to his initial avoidance when he was approached to direct Summer of Soul. “I actively try to run away from it,” he admits. “Most people do run away from their destiny. I’m wise enough to know that the likelihood of me talking myself out of a blessing or self-sabotaging is always an inch away… I’m wise enough, maybe in the last five years, to have a stop and ask myself the stuff that I don’t think Black people are trained to do. What do you fear? What will happen if this happens? If that happens?”
Thompson’s past five years included spending the height of the pandemic in a farmhouse about 45 minutes outside of New York City where he slept eight hours a night for maybe the first time in his life, celebrating his 50th birthday, and marking Hip-Hop’s 50th anniversary; three pivotal moments that prompted some self-reflection.
The self-work that allowed him to fully embrace his genius and own his gift of storytelling across mediums (after his girlfriend at the time helped convince him he’d been tripping) also brought the realization that he was going to have to make different choices if he wanted to actually have the life he’d spent decades delaying for work—before he, too, drove himself to burnout.
But that’s hard. “There’s a lot that comes with the guilt we feel because we don’t know how to express (wanting to prioritize ourselves)… We’re just now happy to (talk about) therapy and all that stuff. I’m not telling you guys I’ve been in therapy since ‘91, at least back then, but we’re just getting there now,” Thompson explains. “So I felt like this is my moment. I’m using the Sly story (because) I want those artists to feel seen, even the ones who are having success. How do you think Rihanna feels right now? Like, okay, it’s about a decade since your last record. I feel like there’s a subconscious fear happening, and I feel like this movie will speak to them.”
I admittedly became the person projecting expectations and hopes of my own. I asked Thompson if between his award-winning Questlove Supreme podcast, his film and TV projects, and the stories he tells regularly on social media, he felt a larger responsibility to combat the waves of ahistorical stories spreading across the internet like kudzu. The short answer is no, but his full answer came with a sigh (I’m not the first to ask him to be a savior).
“Everyone and their mom is like ‘We want you to (tell a certain story).’ The thing is, I’m in my mid-50s, and I’m horrible at relationships. You know that scene in Heat, where (Al) De Niro’s like ‘You’ve got 30 seconds to walk away?’” Thompson often speaks in movie analogies. This one is about meticulously plotting out everything he wanted to do in 2023 and assigning it a firm amount of time (at his therapist’s suggestion). That firm amount of time is how long it will be before he can stop canceling vacation plans, keep his word on personal obligations, and hopefully build a family.
“Integrity is important to me,” he explains. “In my mind, there’s a hard seven stories that I feel like I’m able to tell in a way that a person hasn’t told a story, and I’m not looking to change the world again.” He’s referring to the fortuitous timing of Summer of Soul’s release, which arrived just as the world was opening back up post-pandemic. People were both in need of joy and starving for communal experiences and live music. The documentary provided that all-in-one package and was heavily lauded in return.
Thompson’s remaining “hard seven” stories include an upcoming documentary about legendary funk and soul band Earth, Wind & Fire. Another project is Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music, a documentary celebrating 50 years of Saturday Night Live’s legendary music performances which Thompson co-directed with Oz Rodriguez. At the time of this interview, Ladies & Gentlemen… was already done and in the can for a January 27th release, so maybe we still have six more. SLY LIVES! was an urgent must, though.
While Questlove was on the way home from that aforementioned Italy show, still processing his thoughts about the artist’s meltdown, a friend hit him with a reality that helped snap him out of his judgment. “At the time, I thought (they were) being highly dramatic… (They said) ‘Welp, expect more of that. And expect more artists going down, and people who were once gods 20 years ago. You’ll be the last person standing.’ And then that scared the sh*t out of me, like, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t want to win this way. Like, to the detriment of culture falling.’”
Thompson explains how he views this newfound responsibility to “press the panic button” about this epidemic with yet another set of film analogies. This time through a few iconic, if on-the-nose, end scenes from the ‘90s Black classics that doubled as warnings for the community. “In my mind, I would like to think that I was Larry Fishburne in the last five minutes of School Daze, or even the last scene of Jungle Fever with Wesley Snipes… I don’t want to be the old guy in New Jack City.” The first two characters are disturbed by what they see happening around them and react with a cry for change. The latter is a moral judgment that opts for condemnation over rehabilitation.
I ask Thompson if we–the Black X’ers, the Hip-Hop generation, the first “free” Black generation post-Civil Rights era, whichever identity you chose for us—have learned anything from the stars we watch fade or fall. “I specifically made this for the middle age,” he answers, “because number one, 60% of us are dead…so there’s that part, right? Like, the fact that I never knew there was a website with every dead rapper on it. We’re up to 400 now.”
Questlove and D’Angelo refer to their musical heroes, the masters, the artists they’ve studied extensively, as “Yodas.” Artists like James Brown, Hendrix, Prince, and obviously, Sly. There’s a moment in the doc when D’Angelo answers a question from Thompson (off camera) with ‘You know that, Yoda.’ It’s not a big thing, but it conveys the ongoing dialogs these long-time friends and collaborators have shared about the greats, their art, their impact, and what it cost them. It also highlights that D’Angelo, Questlove, and their peers are now the “Yodas.” Students have become masters, and with mastery comes responsibility.
There’s an almost subliminal call to action among the layers of subtext in SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), which, like Summer of Soul, has especially auspicious release timing. The bulk of the documentary is set during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; a climate of protest, activism, and change that directly shaped Stone’s art. As you read this story, Donald J. Trump will be freshly sworn into his second term as President of the United States, and the climate in America now feels very much like it did 50 and 60 years ago.
In creative spaces, a prevailing question is, “How do artists respond to this time?” I ask Patel if he thinks this film will inspire artists to action. “I hope so, that’s our intent, right? There’s a part in the film where Marc Anthony Neal is talking about the 60s. He’s talking about ‘68, ‘69, but really he’s talking about 2024, ‘25, like campus protests, violence, police brutality.” A potential silver lining to the prospect of dark days ahead is the thought that we’ll at least have some incredible art, because Black people excel in creating something beautiful out of pain and confusion. This is a key to the resilient strength and collective genius of Black people, but something Thompson wrestles with.
“I asked (a friend), if all was correct with the timeline in the world, and we didn’t have to go through the 500 years we went through… would we have ever had those experiences?” He highlights soul food, which he gave up last year, as an example of something we turned into comfort, but was born from trauma, and ultimately became unhealthy for us.
The Philadelphia Soul-bred artist also references the raw emotion required for soul music to be soulful. “Even though it’s tasty, even though it’s a beautiful sound, why do we find comfort in Billy Holiday’s misery? Why did I use to laugh at all of James Brown’s screaming? Should we be happy in major chords and all those things? And I think the answer is yes.”
And this is one of the takeaways from SLY LIVES! for artists and the audience: the cost of Black Genius is immense, and as much as we love the art, we can’t lose sight of the artist’s humanity. “It’s okay to feel pressure,” Patel explains. “It’s okay to talk about it. It’s okay to find ways to deal with it that aren’t self-harming.”
Thompson, who jokes that he’s “the person I used to laugh at” because his worldview has been reshaped through meditation and therapy, puts the lesson of SLY LIVES! in the context of this latest unprecedented era we’re going into as a country, as Black people, and as Black creators.
“We’re going to have to say goodbye to everything that we knew…just on GP… and it pains me because I love a form of entertainment. But it’s also like, dude, the punishments Michael Jackson had to go through to be that perfect, to be that magnetic. If given a choice, would I (want that for him)? No, you don’t have to make a follow-up after Off the Wall. Go off into the sunset, enjoy your life…No one should have to go through that. Prince, same thing, right?” This feels like a part of Thompson’s “hard seven” decision.
“Now that I know how the sausage was made, it’s like a mirror. Either he gets his life back and lives in his light, or we’re gonna have to Men In Black-flashy-thing, and all the things that were joyful, musical discoveries for you as a kid growing up, listening to their music, you have to say goodbye to.”
SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) adds its version of Dap ringing the bell at Mission College to the final scenes with a message via a montage of Black artists who’ve had run-ins with the law, premature deaths, public dust-ups, or a combination of all three. The most remarkable thing is that Stone is still alive.
In addition to that, the spirit of his brilliance and his torment are imprinted on the generations of Black talent that succeeded him–he lives through the Black geniuses of today. It’s not a cautionary tale. It’s a completely human story, arriving at a time when we’ve collectively been through a forced pause. We understand it is possible to put the burden down, but we have to face the feelings that follow.
“One of the scariest things we have to deal with is ourselves…and everything we ever learned, we have to do the opposite. And I know we’re scary, and we’re fearful, but whether you like it or not, you’re gonna have to start all over again. Everything that you knew is in your rearview mirror right now.”
SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) premieres February 13 on Hulu.
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Photographer: Sage East
Photo Assistant: Garren Pryce, Emmanuel Porquin
Wardrobe Stylist: Kate March
Wardrobe Assistant: Jessica Mastorakis
Hair Stylist: Elliott Simpson
Makeup Artist: Kim Braisin
Art Designer: R. Scott Wells
Videographer: Jason Chandler
Video Assistants: Myles, Valerie
English (US) ·