The three albums to check out nextĬurtis Mayfield: We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue – stream Spotify
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Infinitely more people have heard Mayfield’s songs than have seen the movie that inspired them: his plan worked far better than he could have imagined.
It vastly outgrossed the film, although the latter was a box-office success. It wasn’t just Mayfield’s best album, but one of the high watermarks of arguably the most fertile and creative era in soul music’s history. The result wasn’t a soundtrack so much as a concept album inspired by a film. Where Hayes lavished praise on his film’s “sex machine” hero, Mayfield depicted Youngblood Priest filled with “weakness”: “Ask him his dream … he wouldn’t know … time’s running out and there’s no happiness.” The dark mood even seeped into the beautiful Give Me Your Love, its shimmer of strings failing to mask an air of bleak resignation in the lyrics. The title track, meanwhile, was the negative image of Isaac Hayes’ laudatory blaxploitation theme Shaft.
Moreover, Mayfield’s songwriting powers went into overdrive, dredging his own childhood memories for the opening Little Child Running Wild, writing music that wasn’t just supremely funky, but troubled and haunting: the skeletal, insistent Pusherman Eddie You Should Know Better and No Thing on Me, where the starkness of the lyrics snags against the lush orchestration the simultaneously hooky and unflinching Freddie’s Dead. Then he insisted the soundtrack be released months before the film, so that before they saw it, the public would have heard his interpretation of the movie: that Superfly was not a film about, as the posters claimed, “stick it to The Man”, but about desperation (“trying to get over,” as he sang again and again on the title track) that the key character wasn’t its hero Youngblood Priest, but his doomed fall-guy Freddie: “No one’s serious, it makes me furious, don’t be misled – just think of Fred.” So he wrote songs that commented on the plot and criticised its characters, that gave wider social context to the action, that actively sought to undercut the film’s coke-y machismo. Indeed, Mayfield was horrified by the rushes of the film, which he dismissed as “a cocaine infomercial”. His writing was characterised by open-heartedness, empathy and nuance for all its importance in bringing black experience to mainstream cinema, blaxploitation films were frequently violent, cartoonish and shocking. His reputation was built on the protest songs with which he documented the 60s civil rights movement – Keep on Pushing, People Get Ready, Choice of Colours, We’re a Winner. Curtis Mayfield: Superfly – stream SpotifyĬurtis Mayfield was an odd choice to write a blaxploitation soundtrack.
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