Musician and documentary filmmaker Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is back to talk about his new Hulu documentary about Sly Stone. It's called SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius). Also, actor Sebastian Stan talks about portraying Donald Trump in the film The Apprentice. Stan is originally from Romania, born during a communist dictatorship.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is this episode about?
From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, musician and documentary filmmaker Amir Questlove Thompson is back to talk about his newest documentary on Sly Stone and his band The Family Stone. It's called Sly Lives, The Burden of Black Genius. Also, Sebastian Stan talks about his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Donald Trump.
In the film The Apprentice, he plays Trump early in his career. The filmmakers received a cease-and-desist letter from Trump's lawyers, And Trump called the filmmakers human scum.
Human scum. You know, our writer received a lot of death threats, a lot of anti-Semitic remarks as a result of that usage of words.
Stan is originally from Romania, born during a communist dictatorship. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
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This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Today, Amir Questlove-Thompson is back to talk about the life and legacy of Sly Stone. Questlove's new documentary, called Sly Lives, a.k.a. The Burden of Black Genius, is about the impact of Sly Stone and his band Sly and the Family Stone on music and culture. Sly got his start as a DJ and record producer in the early 1960s.
formed a multiracial band with his brother, sister, and other musicians, and went on to record hits like Everyday People, Dance to the Music, Family Affair, and Stand. Their music influenced Prince, George Clinton and Funkadelic, The Ohio Players, Earth, Wind & Fire, and many hip-hop artists. The film also covers the problems that came along with fame and drugs that took Sly down.
Questlove is the co-founder of the hip-hop band The Roots, which is the house band for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. If you feel as if you just heard him on our show, you did when we talked about his other new documentary focused on Saturday Night Live's music guests and music sketches over the past 50 years. That one's called Ladies and Gentlemen, 50 Years of SNL Music.
So let's talk about your slide documentary. I really love this film. I want to start with a song, and it's their first big hit. It's Dance to the Music. It's so catchy, and I'd like you to point out what makes this song special in its moment, which was 1967 or 8?
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Chapter 2: Who is Sly Stone and why is he significant?
Well, that's a really... great question. And it's a, it's, it's one where there's no real clear answer that I can give you. It's, it's, it's a mixed bag. It's a mixed bag. I mean, a lot of ways, a lot of things look very predictable to me, especially having studied him for this film. Um, the victimhood, uh, blaming the revenge tactics, all that we go in depth, uh, in the film that he had
absorbed from Roy Cohn, you really do see, I think even if you look at the inauguration, I mean, and even at the debate, right, with Kamala Harris, I mean, you really see what we talk about in the movie of these sort of ways he's learned to flip it around on the other person and kind of just always just be denying reality and reshaping the truth as long as it fits his narrative.
And the complete, utter lack of Lack of acceptance for any criticism or any wrongdoing or anything whatsoever. So it's eerily familiar. It's predictable. It's also, I may say, tragic because I guess for me...
I also feel like I saw a version of this overweight kid that was paranoid and insecure and desperate for attention that was made to pay a big price at daddy's big betrayal, sending him off to military school where he had to kind of... you know, whatever happened there that dehumanized him further and the revenge that he's been enacting out, you know.
And at the same time, it's hard not to sort of find some of it upsetting as well because I do feel so much of it is rage and anger that's been suppressed and undealt with that we're all having to kind of just, you know, deal with and pay a price for.
Playing him, I'm sure you had to be him and see things from his point of view, which requires you, the actor, to have empathy for Trump, the character that you're portraying.
Well, I think as an actor, you have to kind of go through a process where you look at what are the things here that I feel that are useful for me to do this in the right way that it's asking of me. And what are the things that I feel that are going to work against me? And then you have to sort of become an investigator. And you have to, in a way, be a bodyguard to the character you're playing.
And I've wrestled with a degree of powerlessness as a child that I felt growing up as a result of A lot of change that happened very quickly in formative years where I didn't feel safe and changing countries and changing schools and changing homes and caretakers coming and going and so on. And that's affected my life in a certain way.
But I would argue nowhere near the degree of powerlessness that I feel today. He must have gone through in order to create such an ulterior ego to the extent that he has because that's what I really see it's about with him. It's always power and mistrust and paranoia and everything is transactional. That's how he operates.
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