The impact of ‘Everyday People’: Exclusive clip from Questlove’s ‘Sly Lives!’ documentary examines cultural influence of Sly & the Family Stone hit song
The highly anticipated follow-up to Summer of Soul, Questlove‘s Oscar-winning documentary, is coming to Hulu. Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) examines the life and legacy of Sly & the Family Stone, the groundbreaking band led by the charismatic and enigmatic Sly Stone. The film debuts on the streamer on Feb. 13 and captures the band’s rise, reign, and subsequent fadeout while shedding light on the unseen burden that comes with success for Black artists in America.
In the exclusive clip below, the film looks at the impact of the band’s hit song “Everyday People.”
After hearing the lyric “we’ve got to live together,” music producer and songwriter, Jimmy Jam, states, “That’s the first time you hear that sentiment from a Black artist. There was a utopianism that people were ready to buy into. That female and male and Black and white can create another world. Being so tuneful and just being great music. That was the validation. That was a proof of concept that it was possible.”
Sly Lives! had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January and features appearances from Andre 3000, D’Angelo, Chaka Khan, Q-Tip, Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, George Clinton, Ruth Copeland, and Clive Davis.
“Every project starts with a question, though it doesn’t always end with the same question,” Questlove says in a statemnt. “This one started with several. Going in, I wanted to investigate and interrogate the idea of Black genius. How is it different from the idea of genius in general? What is the effect of being saddled with that label? How much promise is built into it, how much fear, and how much unreasonable expectation? Those are the things I wondered about at the beginning of this process, as well as the lights that I placed on the edge of the runway as I tried to land the plane.”
“Sly Stone was a perfect subject for these questions,” he continues. “He might be the best subject of all time. When he was still in his late 20s, he headlined both Woodstock and the Harlem Cultural Festival on the basis of a string of albums and hit songs that changed the way that pop music worked. He became more famous faster than nearly any Black artist before him, revolutionizing not only what people heard but also how they heard. As fast as he rose, maybe it’s no surprise that he fell — the Icarus principle applied. But the way in which Sly fell, the way in which he was both the captain and victim of his own demise, contained lessons for the rest of us, lessons that he unfortunately never got to apply.”
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film is rated 90 percent fresh from 21 critics. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 80 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating “generally favorable” reviews.
