Mayfield was a son of Chicago, having been raised in the notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects. No one, as Mayfield pointed out, was exempt from the temptation. The drug trade offered the best sense of escape.
#Curtis mayfield superfly free
Steady divestment from black communities, along with increasing levels of violent policing, right at the moment where black people were supposedly free to enjoy the rights of American citizenship, put black neighborhoods at economic depression levels. Politicians were promising to restore “law and order” after years of urban rebellions frightened white folks who had long fled to the suburbs. and the election of President Richard Nixon. Black America faced an uncertain world in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s not simply that the pusherman becomes this singular figure that replaces every important relationship in the addict’s life, but rather that the pusherman could be any one of these people. But Mayfield’s chorus provides us with an important insight into who and what is embodied in the “Pusherman”: It would have been easy to let the tune carry on to the dancefloor with some lighter lyrics, but Mayfield didn’t let listeners off the hook, dropping us into the life of this “man of odd circumstance/A victim of ghetto demands.” He enjoys all the spoils you expect to come from a life of dealing drugs: money, sex, clothes, cars, envy. The drums are brought to the fore, giving us a percussive melody foreign to pop music but which hit the definition of funky. Then, when the percussion kicks in on “Pusherman,” you’re ready to groove. You can feel the pain coursing through his falsetto as it gives way to resigned, desperate moan on the last “let me be.” You cry for the nameless, faceless child who runs with no escape.
The string section is ominous, while the horns feel like a further warning of the dangers Mayfield describes in the lyrics.
The film’s star, the classically trained Ron O’Neal, said in an interview: “ Super Fly is about people who don’t believe in the American Dream at all.”Īs such, Mayfield opens the album with “Little Child Runnin’ Wild,” a song that was in the works before he got the Super Fly assignment, which balances both the frenetic pace and precarious circumstances of ghetto life. The soundtrack became the most cohesive and poignant of Mayfield’s albums because it unfolds around this story of the dispossessed, forgotten strivers. The 1972 film follows Youngblood Priest, disillusioned by the drug trade that brought him riches beyond his imagination, as he seeks to set up one final score before leaving the game for good. This is the backdrop of all of the so-called blaxploitation era of film in the early ’70s, though Super Fly (directed by Gordon Parks Jr.) is the most explicit. As Mayfield’s third studio album as a solo artist, Super Fly perfectly encapsulates the post-Civil Rights/early Black Power feel of black America struggling to survive the social and political consequences of the nation’s conservative backlash. The best political music doesn’t necessarily announce itself as political because it is concerned first and foremost with the people for whom the politics matter the most. But when political music is truly awful-here, think of something like John Lennon’s “Imagine”-it is because the artist has made the same mistake as the politician: they have treated the message as more important than the people it is being delivered to. It tends to be didactic, sure, but that’s an understandable and almost forgivable sin it is difficult to condense any meaningful and convincing political message into the space of a few verses and a chorus. The worst political music sounds like political music. And yet the only protest music to really penetrate the charts was Green Day’s (decent) “ American Idiot” and Jadakiss’ (less decent) “ Why.” Bush was trying to convince the country that there were definitely WMDs in Iraq and even if there weren’t, he was still justified in leading us into another war with no information, no goals, and no end in sight. That’s what all the “conscious” rappers were telling me around the time I discovered Curtis Mayfield’s album some 15 years ago. At least, to my understanding, nothing before the dawn of hip-hop, and even then you had to sacrifice some of those elements for commercial success.
Nothing this raw, this ghetto, this funky, soulful, and political is supposed to sell five million copies. The success of an album like Super Fly goes against all conventional wisdom.