eMusic Review 0
Writing the music cues for Gordon Parks Jr.'s 1972 saga of a drug dealer's big final score, then composing lyrics based on (and undercutting) the film's characters, Curtis Mayfield made his greatest album — and, arguably, the best R&B album of the '70s. Super Fly cemented Mayfield's reputation as black America's most incisive lyrical commentator, thanks to the stinging "Freddie's Dead" and "Little Child Running Wild," not to mention the sardonic title track, a side-eyed celebration of the film's title character: "But when you lose, don't ask no questions why." (Losing, in Mayfield's view, was a foregone conclusion, even if the movie itself ends with Super Fly triumphant.) Even more than Isaac Hayes' Shaft, this is the album that cemented the blaxploitation soundtrack as its own genre-within-a-genre, with Johnny Pate's strings and horns as taut as Mayfield's band itself — the same unit that lit up the performances of Curtis/Live! a year earlier. Not to mention Mayfield's guitar: comforting on the instrumental "Think," stinging on "Freddie's Dead," and never more fluent than on the deadly "Pusherman," the only track untouched by Pate's orchestration, and thus acting as the terse counterbalance to the rest of the album — in the same… read more »
