During the Sundance Film Festival, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson was in his zone at the turntables for the premiere party for Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius). It's his latest film, about the captivating 1970's funkmaster Sylvester Stewart, better known as Sly Stone.
"I always thought the highlight of Sundance was spinning a good party," Thompson told NPR. "Now I'm in a position where I can be the party."
At the festival four years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic kept Thompson from premiering his directorial debut in person. That documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Summer of Soul (... or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), went on to win an Academy Award for best documentary feature. But Thompson's Oscars moment was arguably overshadowed by the infamous moment when actor Will Smith walked onstage to slap presenter Chris Rock.
At Sundance this year, he could finally enjoy a live audience, cheering wildly for him as an Oscar-winning filmmaker. "It's a hell of a victory lap," he said from a condo in Park City, Utah during the festival.
Thompson talked about Stone as a complicated provocateur. "Bless his heart, Sly actually tried to go to taboo territory. [He] put together this intersectional, interracial band: women, men, Black, white. Sly has one foot in San Francisco with all the hippies and one foot in Oakland with all the gangsters."
Using archival clips, the film charts Sly Stone's rise from a Bay Area DJ to wild years with his band, the Family Stone. It illustrates Stone navigating fame before spiraling into drug addiction.
The documentary opens with a clip from a 1982 interview with journalist Maria Shriver. She says to Stone, "You were at that place that every musician wants to be. You get there, and you blow it."
Thompson says that interview question was rather harsh — "an audacious, bold, no-holds barred, Band-Aid ripping method of talking to him. But I also secretly agree with her." He says she could have chosen a more nuanced way to ask about this story, "but that's also the main reason why I did the film. It's like, why do we keep self-sabotaging?"
Telling Sly Stone's story with empathy was a way for Thompson to open a conversation about Black artists and mental health. He talks to Stone's former bandmates and collaborators, like Jimmy Jam, Chaka Khan and Vernon Reid, and some of Sly Stone's disciples, including D'Angelo and André 3000.
"Do you believe in the concept of Black genius?" he asks them.
Specifically, he tries to get at what "the Burden of Black Genius" might mean — it's also the subtitle of the documentary.
Thompson says he's thought a lot about this subject, reflecting upon his own career. He says there are a different set of rules for success for Black artists.
"The main question of the film is: is success scarier than failing?" he says. "We really have a fear of succeeding because that means that you're going to be alone and isolated and separated from what you know. And either you're going to be away so long that when you come back, you're going to change and then really alienate your home base — or you won't be able to take them with you. And if you do take them with you, that becomes burdensome."
Former music journalist Joseph Patel says these are the kinds of themes that make Thompson "one of our preeminent contemporary music historians."
Patel worked with him on Summer of Soul, and produced Sly Lives!
"We wanted to attract people who maybe knew the music, but didn't know the story — and people who maybe didn't know the music that well at all, but are of a certain generation," says Patel. "And then there's a handful of Sly obsessives around the world, hardcore fans. So we wanted to give them something too, that they've never seen or heard before."
In the documentary, Thompson also breaks down Sly Stone's influence on other artists, in part by illustrating how many people went on to sample his music.
"You really see Questlove's DJ skills come into play," says Novena Carmel, a DJ at Los Angeles-area NPR member station KCRW. She's also Sly Stone's daughter.
"I think that he could tell that Questlove is truly a musician, a music lover, and approaches him in the story with respect," she says. "Questlove could also see a lot of himself in my dad in a way, you know — as a musician and as a Black man in the world."
Carmel says her father is now 81 years old and living quietly in the Valley.
"I'm just happy that he's here and that he's clean and he gets to enjoy his family and feel the love that he's going to get from this documentary," she says.
Next, Questlove plans to work on a documentary about the band Earth, Wind & Fire.
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