Sly & the Family Stone vs. Led Zeppelin

The Washington Post celebrates black genius while lamenting the ease of creating white generational wealth.

The first ever Top 40 singles I bought myself in 1969-1970 included Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl,” The Beatles “Hey Jude / Revolution,” Sly & the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) backed with “Everyday People,”

(Granted, “Everyday People” is kind of childish, but I was age 10)

and, if I recall correctly, Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.”

Lately, there are documentaries out about Led Zeppelin and Sly Stone, which I haven’t seen:

The Zeppelin documentary is authorized. The three survivors chose to have it devoted to their triumphant first year together of 1969 when they released two landmark albums, so the tale is a happy one devoted to their music rather than to their later self-inflicted troubles.

The movie about Sly Stone by Questlove devotes attention both to his spectacular rise and then to his decades in the wilderness after he ruined his short but brilliant career with drugs and subsequently squandered countless attempts by his many admirers to help him out.

In a Washington Post review of the two documentaries, a black studies professor expresses comic heapings of anti-white animus and black ethnonarcissism. Like I’ve been saying, in the front of the newspaper, the Racial Reckoning has been memoryholed for being bad for the Democrats, but in the back of the paper, nobody seems to have gotten through to the culture writers that it’s not June 2020 anymore and racist anti-white hate isn’t the fashion of the hour.

Sly Stone, Led Zeppelin and two rock docs that treat ‘genius’ very differently

In “Sly Lives!” and “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” the divergent expectations faced by White and Black musical legends become apparent.

March 5, 2025 at 10:15 a.m.

Guest column by Emily Lordi

Emily Lordi is a mostly white-looking but apparently black-identifying English professor at Vanderbilt who writes mostly about black musicians.

“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.”

When did black intellectuals start obsessing over “generational wealth”? I would have guessed after 2008, perhaps during Occupy Wall Street, but instead the phrase didn’t really take off until 2017 during the Great Awokening.

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. …

But Stone couldn’t withstand what the film’s subtitle calls “The Burden of Black Genius.”

Or, less ethnonarcistically, Stone couldn’t withstand cocaine, which is, I am informed, a helluva drug. (Happily, it appears that Stone finally got sober in 2019 and is now enjoying a normal old age, but way too late to make music.)

Zeppelin drummer John Bonham couldn’t overcome chemical dependence, drinking himself to death in 1980. And seven years of heroin slowed guitarist/producer Jimmy Page from doing anything too groundbreaking after the mid-70s, although in the documentary he seems hale in his early 80s. In the mid-1990s, he reteamed with Robert Plant in a magnificently Orientalist version of “Kashmir” with an Egyptian orchestra:

Plant enjoyed a long, quite respectable post-Zeppelin career, doing unexpected things like teaming up successfully with bluegrass singer Allison Krauss in 2007.

But, unlike with Sly Stone, with Zeppelin there’s little sense of them self-destructing before they had their say. Their body of work is obviously among the most formidable of the second half of the 20th Century.

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),

It’s almost as if the Black Panthers were violent ex-con thugs.

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?”

I would suspect that most artists wonder about such matters. I would also suspect that black artists are, on the whole, less crippled by self-doubt than are white artists.

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.

I’m not exactly sure what the English professor is trying to say here — her prose is unclear — but plenty of black musicians got called geniuses. For example, “The Genius” was a nickname used by the press for Ray Charles since the 1950s. Charlie Parker was often praised as a genius in the late 1940s, and before him, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.

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.

Huh?

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