To understand what my favorite band of all time meant to me, read my high school yearbook quote. When I needed to make sense of that time in my life, when I needed to invoke scriptures that stirred something inside me, I turned to the words of the holy Earth, Wind, and Fire (EWF), the Book of “Shining Star”:
Born a manchild of the sun
Saw my work had just begun
Saw I had to stand alone
Bless it now I’ve got my own.
As I grew into an adult, I watched EWF’s impact and legacy fade. Many of our greatest pop icons — Michael, Beyonce, the Beatles, Elvis, Bob Marley, etc. — live large in documentaries, “Behind the Music”-like treatments, and endless tributes, but EWF has received an insufficient amount of that love.
At least until now. The beauty of Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is that he takes artists who often get reduced by white taste-makers to a Black music subcategory, and restores them to their rightful place at the foundational center of American music craft and culture. Thompson’s Academy Award-winning “Summer of Soul”; his “Sly Lives,” which profiled Sly Stone; and now his latest, “Earth, Wind & Fire: To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World,” all take on the grinding task of naming a new American songbook for the second half of the 20th century. While the film shows that the magic of EWF has always been a product of collaboration, Thompson dramatizes the extent to which its founder and leader, the late Maurice White, is the axis about which EWF rotated.
“Earth, Wind, and Fire” is just as much a love letter to the EWF faithful as it is documentation for the masses. Its intimacy comes from its close collaboration with surviving band members, access to archival footage, and Thompson’s off-camera reactions, not to mention the film’s inventive use of vibrant animation and graphics to fill in visual storytelling gaps. Its poignancy comes from its ability to translate on screen the joy, soulful immediacy, and imagination that EWF’s music communicated to a generation yearning for deeper meaning on their radio dial.
The film starts with Maurice White’s early days as a drummer in Memphis and traces his jazz music scene evolutions in Chicago and pop refinements in L.A. chronologically. In doing so, the film highlights the bands White contributed to, such as the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and the iterations of EWF that he founded and led. It also explores the idiosyncrasies that informed his leadership of EWF — his solitary nature; his restless, mostly Jesus-free, spiritual cravings; and his fascination with afrofuturism.
The film’s interviewees include key members of his bands, including White’s brother, the bassist Verdine White; lead vocalist and renowned falsetto Philip Bailey; and drummer Ralph Johnson; past managers, handlers, and producers; as well as his life partner, Marilyn White, and two of his children. To demonstrate the impact that EWF had on generations of musicians, we hear from Stevie Wonder, Lionel Ritchie, James “Jimmy Jam” Harris III, H.E.R., and Anderson Paak. Thompson also indulges in some gratuitous celebrity flex by including Barack and Michelle Obama in the interview mix. They are delightful presences on screen, but offer little beyond surface-level fan insight and soundbites.
As the film tells the story of EWF, some clichés are unavoidable. White propels the familiar man-starts-band, man-loses-band, man-reunites-with-band trajectory that frames the film. We’re on hand when EWF sells millions of records and wins Grammys before eventually failing to keep pace with the changes in American musical tastes and cultural sensibilities. EWF helped give life to the funk-rich, spiritual meaning-making of the 1970s, but it was ultimately buried by the disco-infused, synthesizer-dominated me-ness of the ’80s.
It’s notable that the one music industry trope White and EWF seem to avoid is the drug- and alcohol-soaked addiction story. Since EWF did such an efficient job of keeping their drama and backstories out of the public eye, much of the film was quite revelatory. For all the peace and harmony White projected on stage and in his music, we learn that he could be a heartless “chickensh*t” who pathologically avoided confrontation. White was an indisputably brilliant songwriter, producer, and builder of epic orchestral bands, but he was also a lousy businessman, a narcissist, and a chronic and unrepentant philanderer. The film does its best to explain these shortcomings by psychoanalyzing White’s abandonment as a child.
For all of its behind-the-scenes value, the film benefits the most from the fact that Thompson is a musician who appreciates White’s artistry because he understands what it takes to create it. For example, Thompson’s mind is blown when he learns that Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” was inspired by “Shining Star.” We learn the funk contributions of guitarist Al McKay, White’s mentorship of his young bandmembers, and how the band never fully recovered its mojo after the death of arranger Charles Stepney. We are brought into the arrangements and production elements of masterpiece albums like “Open Our Eye,” “That’s the Way of the World,” and “Spirit.”
None of the stagecraft, concert magic, costumes, and choreography that electrified their concerts and album covers quite equaled EWF’s musicianship.
For those of us who followed EWF’s heyday in real time, the film helps connect dots. We witness the industry and financial pressures that dragged White into watered-down crossover. We get a clearer understanding of why, after the album “I Am,” White begins to abandon the elements that made EWF so special, namely its spirituality; its rootedness in gospel, free jazz, and African rhythms; and its inventiveness.
Some of the film’s other nuggets include the story of how George Clinton jolted EWF into a dedication to deep funk, and lead vocalist Philip Bailey’s finally copping to what I’ve known all along: The seemingly romantic slow jam “Reasons” is actually a guilt-filled meditation on a one-night stand.
Thompson ends the film with a nod to the universality of EWF’s music and a celebration of its biggest-selling song, “September.” This sequence is an uplifting vision of inclusion that shows people of all races and generations dancing to and mouthing the words to the 1978 song. While I understand the impulse to end on such a feel-good note, “September,” like “Boogie Wonderland,” was co-written by Allee Willis and was a 1970s harbinger of EWF’s gradual 1980s descent into pop genericism.
Willis, along with others like David Foster, who was derisively referred to as “that white boy” by disenchanted band members in the film, didn’t share the musical groundings of the band, but were enlisted by White to write and produce music. This new sound introduced into EWF’s repertoire in the late ’70s and ’80s broadened their appeal at the expense of a more soulfully resonant message, one that had always been coded with a wide variety of African-descended music traditions. In doing so, White forever disconnected EWF from its original fan base. By ending the film with “September,” Thompson undermines perhaps the film’s keenest observation: that EWF reached its greatest success when it “embraced [the idea] that music can have a higher purpose.”
