One word has the tendency to make artists myths, and then measuring them with the myth as their rod, which they fail to pass. The thing about genius is that it grants immortality, but it also determines who is forgiven, who is questioned, and who is free to fade away temporarily without being declared dead and unrepairable.
It is difficult to miss the split when two studio giants of the era, Brian Wilson and Sly Stone, sit together. They were both introduced early, both constructed new worlds with old materials and both saw expectation become a form of surveillance. However, their subsequent chapters fell elsewhere in the popular mind – not so much due to the music being different, but because the culture was.
The canon of Wilson has been retold as a complex success, the gradual smolder of redemption being created. Some of that brightness was not organic: the image of the genius Wilson had nurtured in the minds of those around the fan had not just appeared of its own, it was helped along by a 1966 PR campaign which made the word canon feel official. The piece caught the eye and the tag used counted because when it all goes wrong labels are armor. Another technical narrative that is now fondly recounted by critics and that Wilson loved to spread is that pop could be shot like a film: recordings of scenes being filmed individually, and then edited into an ultimate emotional narrative.
Sly Stone come with other freights. Seamless lineup of his band was not a pop quirk, but a socially charged tune, and the tune escorted him everywhere. Everyday People was both a handshake and a dare simultaneously, with that first person chorus chirping demand that the listener acknowledge that we are right there. Once the sound of Sly was chilled and choked down into the purpled interior of There’s a Riot Goin On, reception was not merely a matter of taste it was a matter of who was permitted to be hard and nasty and yet deemed worth the trouble. The music continued to drive into the future of funk, yet the discourse surrounding it might still continue to be like a border patrol.
That tension wasn’t new. Woodstock mythmaking was a long time overtaking gatekeepers policing on whose sound could be mainstream without punishment. Among the reported trends was the industry norm of white performers covering R&B hits which was a move that had dire consequences on the success of black music artists even though it was stealing their invention. The past did not remain in the past; it influenced the meaning of crossover, who was praised to do it.
The script hardened when both men were pushed into recession, substances, and instability that was facing the crowd. Wilson may be portrayed as the weak auteur, the talented architect who is in his echo chamber. In 1976 on television, he gave a line as a summing-up of the era: I did my dose of LSD, it separated my brain, and I came back…thank God, in I don’t know how many pieces, I don’t know how many pieces, I don’t know how many pieces… The tale of Sly was more amenable to the cultural flattening-to-warning-label melodrama-less space of the cultural to allow the thought of a boundary-bending Black pop genius also being gently softened, with no strings attached.
Such an imbalance is precisely what the documentary Sly Lives! (or The Burden of Black Genius) by Questlove puts in the table, and makes biography a broader diagnosis. The technique of the movie, where musicians talk directly into the camera, is based on the intimacy, rather than spectacle, and the innovative approach used by Sly is to be listened to, rather than to be survived. According to the director, the answer to the question What is the burden of Black genius is answered throughout the whole movie, despite the fact that there is no question and answer.
The more genius as a brand the more it acts like a contract. Time, patience and presumption of humanity are also part of it to some artists. To other people, it is accompanied with a shorter leash: represent, reassure, return, and do it on schedule.
What is left in the mythology, the comeback stories is a more basic truth the music continues to reiterate brilliant people made impossible art, and then paid varying costs in being fallible in public.
