Sly Stone performing at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969. Searchlight Pictures

“I hate to say it,” the rhythm and blues singer D’Angelo ventures toward the end of Questlove’s new documentary “Sly Lives!” (streaming on Hulu), “but these White rock-and-rollers, these motherf—ers go out in style, they go out paid. … They die in their tomato garden with their grandson, laughing … generational wealth passed down.”

Stone’s legacy is different. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the West Coast polymath synthesized acid rock and funk through his multiracial, mixed-gender group Sly and the Family Stone, embodying countercultural possibility. (“We got to live together!” they sang in 1968’s “Everyday People.”) He then rescinded that optimism on his 1971 masterpiece, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” an album whose jagged distortions seemed to reflect the despondency of the Nixon years. Though it wasn’t the last Family Stone record, it has been heralded as the final salute of a tragic, carnivalesque figure who created some of his era’s most memorable music, only to blow his money on drugs, alienate his bandmates and withdraw from public life in the 1980s.

Questlove at the WSJ. Magazine Innovators Awards on Oct. 29, 2024. Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Stone, who published an unsentimental memoir in 2023, doesn’t participate in “Sly Lives!,” though Questlove (the drummer of the Roots and director of the documentary “Summer of Soul”) taps an impressive group of experts to compensate. Vernon Reid of Living Colour, the producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Andre 3000, the writer Dream Hampton, and most members of the Family Stone testify to his genius as a multi-instrumentalist and composer who influenced artists from Prince to Outkast. We see his tightly rehearsed ensemble performing in platform boots and sequined jackets on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” electrifying Woodstock and appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone.

But Stone couldn’t withstand what the film’s subtitle calls “The Burden of Genius.” The phrase describes the pressures that have beset Black celebrities from Billie Holiday to D’Angelo, including isolation from the community one is expected to represent (the Black Panthers ask Stone for thousands of dollars, which he refuses to give), as well as the questions that, according to Reid, haunt all Black artists in America: “Who do you think you are? What you think you’re doing?”

Questlove, crucially, revises Stone’s prevailing image as an unwitting culture hero and refutes a long history of excluding Black artists from the category of genius itself. His depiction of Stone as a socially responsive, innovative hitmaker broadens the traditional concept of the genius as a creator of “timeless” works of art that transcend the real world and the market. Yet because “Sly Lives!” leaves intact the romance of the tortured genius, the film inducts Stone into a rarefied club while weighing him down in the same gesture.

One hopes that Stone, on the other side of this reappraisal, might one day get the treatment enjoyed by Led Zeppelin in their own new documentary, which depicts the British quartet as secure enough in their status as rock gods to appear as real people. To see Stone in this untragic light would only magnify his achievements.

Jimmy Page in 2021. AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis

The British group rose to fame at roughly the same time as the Family Stone. The two bands headlined the massive Laurel Festival in Maryland in July 1969. Yet “Becoming Led Zeppelin” (currently in theaters), an account of the band’s formative years directed by Bernard MacMahon, inadvertently underscores the difficulties of Black genius by displaying the relative ease of the White kind.

From high-backed chairs in a space that resembles a cozy British library, Zeppelin’s three surviving members — guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones — describe themselves as emboldened by a spirit of postwar optimism to seek more creatively fulfilling jobs than their parents. Inspired by the “R&B boom” that Plant calls his “musical bloodstream,” they cut a demo in London and sign with Atlantic Records in New York. Their debut, the first of four self-titled albums the band released between 1969 and 1971, is designed for continuous play. “We’re an album band,” Page declares: “We’re not doing singles.”

The marketplace is one of many worldly concerns the band appears to transcend. (Atlantic paid a then-massive $200,000 to sign them.) Another is the status of the blues as intellectual property. The group notoriously cribbed lyrics straight from the blues (“shake for me, girl, I wanna be your backdoor man” in the song “Whole Lotta Love”). They later settled with Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon for copyright infringement. MacMahon presents a montage of contemporaneous international developments, from the war in Biafra to nuclear testing in the States. Yet the only current event the artists mention is the moon landing (it transpired, Plant dreamily recalls, while the band played a show in a tent). No one pressures Zeppelin to speak to social issues, or to conform to the tastes of American critics who heard their early efforts as self-indulgent and repetitive. The film concludes with the hometown heroes’ return to London for a concert in 1969.

One can sense the group still subtly shoring up their anti-commercial, individualist rock bona fides, in accordance with the era’s rock criticism. When Lester Bangs, reviewing the group’s third album for Rolling Stone in 1970, invoked the group’s “special genius,” he did so ironically, describing the “two-dimensionality” of their wailing pagan rites on “Immigrant Song.” They eventually won over their detractors (the magazine praised their fourth album for its “low-keyed and tasteful subtlety”). But their legacy was largely consolidated by adoring fans, as well as by John Bonham’s death in 1980. The drummer, an alcoholic, choked on his own vomit during a pre-session bender at age 32. The loss catalyzed the band’s breakup, but it also stationed the group among the greats (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix) whose talent was too much for the world.

Zeppelin’s trajectory is arguably just as tragic as that of the Family Stone. Yet so much depends on how these bands’ stories are told. Even Bonham’s absence occasions a reunion of sorts: MacMahon plays a rare recording in which he says how much he likes his bandmates, who fondly listen in. Zeppelin appears to float above the world because there is no one else in the picture – no talking heads besides the artists themselves. The rest of their story is told through concert footage. (A performance of “Dazed and Confused” in Denmark offers an extraordinary demonstration of camaraderie: Plant listens, quietly moaning along, to Page’s five-minute guitar solo; Jones orients his bass line around Bonham’s kick drum.)

MacMahon’s decision to entrust the story to the music and musicians leaves plenty of room for nostalgia and protective obfuscation: the very stuff of myth. But it also shows the band to be as blithely charming and shrewd as real people – the thing missing from Stone’s depiction in Questlove’s documentary.

If the Family Stone were to tell the story themselves, we might learn that, even after they dissolved in the 1970s, its members did other things. Bassist Larry Graham formed Graham Central Station, which included the trumpet player Cynthia Robinson; the drummer Greg Errico played with Santana and the Grateful Dead. They kept going because they were not only symbols but also people who loved to create.

To see Stone as a working musician might dispel the supposed scandal of his addiction – a common enough issue, even for those who aren’t generational talents – and underscore the economic and legal issues that kept him hustling through the ’70s and ’80s.

He sold most of his catalogue to Michael Jackson in 1983, thus forfeiting royalties on countless samples, which showed up everywhere from Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” (1989) to the Roots’ “Star/Pointro” (2004). (He bought a minority interest back in 2019.) Stone writes in his memoir that he was still driven to create, though few people were listening. Yet he expresses pride at kicking his addiction, in 2019, and repairing his relationships with his family. There’s no tomato garden, no great inheritance. But the fact that Stone has survived to become what his daughter Novena Carmel, interviewed for the film, calls “a standard old Black man” – interested in westerns and cars, belatedly engaged with his children and grandkids – is a genuine accomplishment.

Stone’s brand of Black genius produced tremendously influential, virtuosic, consciousness-raising hits. That contribution so far exceeds what is asked of White artists that we might stop lamenting its transience. Footage of the band playing “I Want to Take You Higher” in the predawn darkness of Woodstock shows just how hard they’re working to deliver on the promise of the song title – led by an artist who, he has said, looked out at the acres of people and thought, “We’d better not make a mistake.” When Stone segues into the bridge of the 1973 track “If You Want Me to Stay” with a vocal cry that the organ extends – when, in the last 50 seconds of “Stand!” (1969), the band kicks off a party that could go on forever – the music endures so its creators can rest.

Emily Lordi is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University and the author of several books on Black music and culture, including “The Meaning of Soul.”