FEATURE:
Little Child Runnin’ Wild
Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly at Fifty
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TOMORROW marks…
fifty years since the release of the Curtis Mayfield album, Super Fly. From the film of the same name, it is one of the greatest albums ever. The third studio album by the late Soul great, it was released on 11th July, 1972. It The soundtrack for the Blaxploitation film of the same name, Super Fly is considered a classic of 1970s Soul and Funk music. A hugely popular and big-selling album, Super Fly was one of the pioneering Soul concept albums, with its socially aware lyrics about poverty and drug abuse meaning that it stood out and resonated. A soundtrack that is as powerful now as it was in 1972, there was not a lot of expectation that Super Fly would be a big hit and sell a lot. A flawless nine-track album, Super Fly did almost instantly fly off the shelves. I guess having two million-selling singles in the form of Freddie's Dead and the title track means Super Fly actually outgrossed the film itself! I am going to conclude with a couple of reviews for Super Fly. As it is a classic and one of the all-time greats, there is hardly anything but absolute praise and respect for Curtis Mayfield’s 1972 masterpiece. Before that, this article from 2018 looked at the remarkable Super Fly:
“Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly stood at the crossroads, ushering in a new bright and infectious sound, one that was all about the ghetto, though with its groove laden background, reached out and captured the hearts and minds of white listeners during the hot summer of 1972, where the record went on to sell more than five million copies.
Alright, in all honesty this album did not encapsulate the black experience in America for everyone, though for an element it rang true, embracing the decline of cities across this country, while those of culturally similar backgrounds began exploiting each other, creating even more despair and disillusion. Yet in the same breath, one can see this song and the full album as the cohesive story of the dispossessed and forgotten strivers, those who didn’t, don’t, or couldn’t believe the American dream … so they created their own, with all of the music brought to life with a sense of ominousness, while the horn arrangements only accentuated that fact seeming to ring out as warning alarms.
As to the music contained in this package, perhaps no other element is more tastefully, yet bittersweetly satisfying than the song “Pusherman,” filled with a nonpareil funkiness that roots ambiguously for the underdog (the dope dealer), even in the face of the destruction he brings. Of course this attitude is easily understood if one remembers that the War in Viet Nam was just drawing to a close, with black men returning to this nation unafraid of overweight white cops sitting in their police cruisers eating jelly donuts, talking of their high school glory days. Of course it wasn’t all the result of Viet Nam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and the election of Richard Nixon all played their parts in causing the reality of this soundtrack to ring true.
Superfly was intended to spill from your stereo bigger than life, filled with entanglements that were beyond analyzation, and to that end, Mayfield was no saint, being arrested many times for his abusive behavior toward women, where perhaps our tolerance of this aspect only encouraged others to swagger down the same path, as they were taught that this was how life was lived. So, while Curtis Mayfield may be considered a rare American poet, one who was capable of jabbing social commentary, he certainly lived a contradictory life. Nevertheless, the album was a splendid vehicle for Mayfield, one that’s certainly been attempted since, yet stands as a singular crowning achievement, perhaps because Mayfield was at the right place at the right time with the right skills.
Despite all this, the underlying current was intended not to champion, or revere the seedy underbelly, though it did have that effect, as its intentions were that of anti-drug, self liberation and social awareness, all delivered with musical diversity and fleshed out with perfection … solid grooves laced with adventurous stories, that certainly inspired the likes of Bruce Springsteen”.
One of those albums that anyone can hear and instantly feel moved and affected by, Mayfield composed and wrote every track. One of the most underrated and greatest songwriters of his generation, his endless talent and passion is evident throughout a soundtrack that ranks alongside the very best of them. Maybe Super Fly is the greatest soundtrack album ever. AllMusic reviewed Super Fly and had this to say:
“The choice of Curtis Mayfield to score the blaxploitation film Super Fly was an inspired one. No other artist in popular music knew so well, and expressed through his music so naturally, the shades of gray inherent in contemporary inner-city life. His debut solo album, 1970's Curtis, had shown in vivid colors that the '60s optimist (author of the civil-rights anthems "Keep On Pushing" and "People Get Ready") had added a layer of subtlety to his material; appearing on the same LP as the positive and issue-oriented "Move On Up" was an apocalyptic piece of brimstone funk titled "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go." For Super Fly, Mayfield wisely avoids celebrating the wheeling-and-dealing themes present in the movie, or exploiting them, instead using each song to focus on a different aspect of what he saw as a plague on America's streets. He also steers away from explicit moralizing; through his songs, Mayfield simply tells it like it is (for the characters in the film as in real life), with any lessons learned the result of his vibrant storytelling and knack of getting inside the heads of the characters. "Freddie's Dead," one of the album's signature pieces, tells the story of one of the film's main casualties, a good-hearted yet weak-willed man caught up in the life of a pusher, and devastatingly portrays the indifference of those who witness or hear about it. "Pusherman" masterfully uses the metaphor of drug dealer as businessman, with the drug game, by extension, just another way to make a living in a tough situation, while the title track equates hustling with gambling ("The game he plays he plays for keeps/hustlin' times and ghetto streets/tryin' ta get over"). Ironically, the sound of Super Fly positively overwhelmed its lyrical finesse. A melange of deep, dark grooves, trademarked wah-wah guitar, and stinging brass, Super Fly ignited an entire genre of music, the blaxploitation soundtrack, and influenced everyone from soul singers to television-music composers for decades to come. It stands alongside Saturday Night Fever and Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols as one of the most vivid touchstones of '70s pop music”.
Prior to wrapping up, I want to quote from Pitchfork’s extensive and detailed review of Super Fly. As impressive as the music and Mayfield’s vocals is, I am especially amazed at how influential Super Fly is. It is an album that will continue to influence people and be talked about fondly:
“The cheesiest of the album’s nine tracks is “No Thing on Me (Cocaine Song)” which feels thrown in to satisfy Mayfield’s desire to ensure that he didn’t glorify drug use, as the film tended to do. But even with his overly cautious, hall-monitor lyrics (“You don’t have to be no junkie”), he never leaves the groove behind, opting this time for something a bit more triumphant and celebratory. He closes it out with “Superfly,” a clear attempt at mimicking the boisterous superhero anthem that Isaac Hayes provided for Shaft the year before. Hayes’ song may be the single most popular track of the blaxploitation genre, but that has as much to do with its being peppered with easily parodied, overtly ’70s slang as it does with the quality of the song (it helped Hayes become the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song). “Superfly” aspires to be as big, musically, as “Theme from Shaft,” but it doesn’t sacrifice on the thematic continuity. This is still about hustling, surviving, poverty, blackness, and pain. It is, as Mayfield’s highest falsetto intones at the end of the song, about “Tryin’ ta get over.”
Super Fly inspired imitations in the blaxploitation soundtrack genre, such as Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street, James Brown’s Black Caesar, and Willie Hutch’s The Mack (not bad imitations, but imitations nonetheless) that didn’t quite capture the tension, despair, and astute political analysis that make Super Fly stand out. Mayfield created the perfect film soundtrack; certainly the best of the blaxploitation genre, and perhaps, outside of Prince’s Purple Rain, the best of any soundtrack written and produced by a single artist.
And while he sang sweetly on record, Mayfield had entanglements with the real women in his life that were much more harsh. According to the Curtis Mayfield biography, Traveling Soul, co-written by his son Todd Mayfield and Travis Atria, around the time of Super Fly’s success, Curtis was abusive toward the woman he lived with, identified only as Toni, and referred as his “spiritual wife.” Todd writes: “On vacation in Nassau in October [1972], right around Super Fly’s ascendance to the top of the pops, he and Toni got into a late-night argument as [his daughters] Tracy, Sharon, and I slept in another room. When the commotion startled me awake, I walked out to find policemen hulking in the doorway and Toni with a black eye. Dad never did these things in front of us, but we’d see the aftermath.”
There is a tendency to celebrate male artist in such an uncomplicated way that obscures, and even rationalizes, some truly abhorrent behavior. This is especially true when it comes to violence against women committed by musicians we celebrate for their political contributions. We have to be willing to complicate the legacies of the men responsible for these acts. Entangled within Mayfield’s life is Super Fly, the ghetto, funky, soulful, political album that was disseminated across America. Maybe the conscious rappers of my youth were right. If Super Fly needed to accomplish all of that to become popular, it’s the exception that proves the rule. It was a moment of fortune”.
Tomorrow is going to be a special day, as so many websites and music journalists will write about Super Fly on its fiftieth anniversary. One of those rare soundtracks that has stood out from the film itself as a work of brilliance in its own right, there is no doubting that the mighty and magnificent Super Fly is…
ONE for the musical history pages.
