“It’s not that the ghetto is thriving with pimps and pushermen, it’s just they are a very visible part of the ghetto. “I didn’t have to leave my neighborhood to be surrounded by the things Super Fly is about,” he told Rolling Stone in 1973. Mayfield understood the film from personal experience. After Super Fly, Mayfield did some of the best work of his career, writing the soundtracks for films such as Claudine, Let’s Do It Again, and Sparkle, but these songs are often overlooked since he wrote them for other artists to sing (Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Staples Singers, and Aretha Franklin, respectively).Ģ. That film has had a strange afterlife in popular culture, with references by Monty Python, on Seinfeld, and most recently in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood. Super Fly wasn’t Curtis Mayfield’s first work for film, nor was it his last.īefore Super Fly, Mayfield wrote two songs for 1969’s volcano-themed disaster film Krakatoa, East of Java, a critical and commercial failure for many reasons, not least of which is that Krakatoa is west of Java.
To celebrate Mayfield’s gutsy, gritty masterpiece on its 50th anniversary, here are 10 things you didn’t know about Super Fly. But the album is so much more: a personal manifesto, a passionate cry, and an incisive sociological statement on race in America. The songs are a mixture of scene-setting (“Little Child Running Wild,” “Give Me Your Love”) and character studies (“Freddie’s Dead,” “Super Fly,” “Eddie You Should Have Known Better”). Still, Mayfield’s Super Fly stands alone. Blige's 'My Life' Documentary: 8 Things We Learnedīlaxploitation soundtracks produced some of the best work from many musical giants of the era, including James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and Isaac Hayes. Blige Was Worried About the Sophomore Jinx. It was important to Mayfield that Priest ended up winning in the end not through violence, but through his intellect. The film - an early staple of the blaxploitation era that kicked off a year earlier with 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft - ends with Priest double-crossing the double-crossers, walking away with his money, life, and swagger intact.
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But Eddie sees no other option than a life of crime, and when a group of crooked, racist white cops offer them as much drug business as they want, plus protection, Eddie falls for it, leaving Priest blackmailed into a corner.
“Curtis Mayfield was as gifted as Bach or Beethoven.”ĭirected by Gordon Parks Jr., the film Super Fly follows Youngblood Priest, a drug dealer who wants to make one more big score with his partner, Eddie, and then leave the game forever. “I always felt those songs will be relevant forever, because they are so strong,” said guitarist Phil Upchurch, who was an acolyte of Mayfield’s style and played on the Super Fly album.
But somehow, with Super Fly he found another gear, a new level of artistry that would define him forever. He had also dealt with the dramatic changes of the Nixon era on his first solo album, 1970’s Curtis, and his 1971 follow-up, Roots. He had spent a decade with the Impressions, becoming one of pop music’s de facto voices of the civil rights movement with songs like “Keep on Pushing” and “People Get Ready.” He had written hundreds of songs for dozens of other artists (Major Lance, Gene Chandler, and the entire roster of OKeh Records, to name a few). In late 1971, when Curtis Mayfield began writing Super Fly - the 1972 film soundtrack that would turn out to be his magnum opus - he should have been burned out. Curtis Mayfield - Credit: Michael Putland/Getty Images
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