[Today: Curtis Mayfield goes downtown...]
“White flight” was the popular term for the phenomenon of caucasians fleeing urban centers for the safety and comfort of the suburbs. America has experienced two pronounced periods of white flight – the first shortly after World War II, when the newly minted interstate freeway system unlocked the potential of living outside the city, and the second in the late-60s and early-70s, when the infrastructure of big cities like New York, Washington DC and Los Angeles was either burned out or falling into crumbling disrepair.
This white abandonment of downtown, USA had one immediate effect: the creation of semi-lawless concrete hectacres populated by pimps, pushers, hustlers and junkies. Crime rose throughout the early-70s in cities across the country, accelerating a cycle of flight and destruction. A secondary effect of white flight was the sudden need for cheap, black-oriented movies to fill up empty theaters throughout those cities. Blaxploitation film was pioneered by Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and legitimized by the Academy Award-winning Shaft. These movies featured heroic, gun-toting black men like John Shaft and Truck Turner, who wiped out the bad guys and won over the ladies while walking tall and flashing plenty of style.
The soundtracks to many blaxploitation films nodded and winked at inner-city issues while paying off movies that glorified the very violence that made living there such a nightmare. But Curtis Mayfield’s songs for Gordon Parks Jr.’s Superfly rise above the genre (and this movie) to truly capture what was going on in the American ghettos of the 1970s. ‘Pusherman’ and the title track take critical views of small-time hoods and their vices, and ‘Freddie’s Dead’ mournfully sounds the consequences of living within the urban blight. This vivid, intense, and moving album is Mayfield’s finest, and stands alongside What’s Goin’ On as the best social commentary in a decade that sorely needed more of it.
Listen: Superfly
Listen: Freddie’s Dead (Theme From Superfly)
Listen: Pusherman
Tags: Curtis Mayfield, Gordon Parks Jr., John Shaft, Shaft, Superfly, Truck Turner
11 June 2010 at 6:46 pm |
When I was a kid, my half-sisters moved in with their father, so I didn’t have the older sibling kind of guidance so many others did. As for most of my friends at the time, THEY were the oldest kids in their families. So we were kind of left to our own devices when it came to finding music that we liked. And, since it was the heyday of Top 40 radio, you can imagine where our tastes landed. At 9 and 10 years old, we didn’t even know the FM dial existed. We were all about KHJ, the Real Don Steele, and bubblegum music. So much so that I was frighteningly happy to learn that my oldest sister, attending UCLA, had moved into a duplex right across the street from the Osmond family in Westwood.
So what does all this embarrassing history have to do with Curtis Mayfield’s masterpiece, Superfly? Well, the early 70s were also the heyday of blaxploitation flicks, movies that promised more sex, violence, and don’t forget sex, than our little minds could handle. Shaft and Superfly topped our mental Must-See lists, but of course there was no way in hell our parents would’ve ever taken us to see any of these movies. Soooo, the next best thing was to buy the soundtracks and the novelizations. At least that way we could read the stories and imagine everything in our heads, while listening to the right music.
When I bought the Superfly soundtrack, it was a revelation, a complete game-changer. It didn’t come with the choreographed dance steps of the Osmonds or the Jackson 5, and David Cassidy’s amazing hair (which we all knew was his secret for scoring with the chicks) was nowhere to be found. Instead, there was just 10 of the toughest tracks I’d ever heard. And once I heard them, I knew there was a world of music to explore beyond bubblegum, and that I had better get started checking it out.
12 June 2010 at 9:29 am |
One thing I’ve learned with this blog is that comments that begin with the phrase “When I was a kid…” are usually pretty cool. The above is certainly no exception – thanks for posting this and sharing your personal history with this album. Good stuff…
3 April 2011 at 7:41 am |
[...] the same as it ever was. This understanding was reflected in the music of Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and George Clinton’s band Funkadelic. Like Funkadelic, Black Nasty was a Detroit-based funk [...]