Higher
Sly Stone's story was bigger than himself—and also not big enough to contain him
Sly Stone, who died today at 82, was one of those extremely rare artists who’s at once a perfect reflection, a harbinger, and a prime mover of his times. That requires both a superhuman sensitivity to the waves in the air and an impossibly autonomous internal world—a contradiction that has consumed his likes before and no doubt will again. He incarnated the dream MLK spoke of, creating his “Family” band in that utopian integrationist image, and he then became an avatar of the wreckage of the civil-rights-movement dream, in 1970s backlash, paranoia, and freebase haze. His genius seems to have been too much even for him to carry long, though that spark never fully stopped flashing and winking. That is, of course, till now.
In the fall of 2023, I wrote this Bookforum piece about Stone’s let’s-call-it-a-memoir, where I fleshed out some of those points and disputed some of the received rock-crit wisdom about him. I’m proud of it, but I’m also very glad that flawed book was followed up by Questlove’s superb documentary, which probes his life as a case study especially in how America treats the gifted and Black. Had he died three or four years ago, it might have felt like his legacy had not been celebrated or reckoned with properly. This year, happily, that’s not so true. Stone’s path always will be a discomfiting one, but there is at least some comfort there.
The Questlove film and book worked well in tandem, I thought — filled in each other's blanks. I'd loved many of the records for decades, and knew much of Sly's basic career arc, but I learned a lot.
He brought a lot of joy into my life when I needed it, which was most of the time. Peter Wolf's book contains a funny Sly anecdote (and an uncomfortable amount of hooey).