Curtis Mayfield: Super Fly (soundtrack, 180g) [RHINO]

Why you'll love it

This 180g reissue was cut from the original masters and comes in a die-cut jacket. Super Fly went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, outsold the film it was written for and gave Mayfield two Top 10 singles in "Freddie's Dead" and "Superfly."

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Cut from the original masters
• Die-cut jacket

About the album

Director Gordon Parks Jr. asked Curtis Mayfield for one song and a cameo as the nightclub band. Mayfield went home to a basement apartment in Chicago and wrote a whole album instead, one that looked hard at the street life the film portrayed and set it to some of the sweetest, funkiest music of the decade.

"Pusherman" was cut at Bell Sound in New York, and the rest came together in a three-day session in Chicago with as many as 40 players and Johnny Pate's arrangements. Wah-wah guitar, congas and strings drive "Little Child Runnin Wild" and "Freddie's Dead," Mayfield's falsetto floats over "Give Me Your Love (Love Song)," and "Superfly" closes it with a strut. Mayfield said he didn't have to leave his neighbourhood to understand the story, and you can hear that conviction in every line he sings, gentle as his voice is, and the band never lets the groove drop for a second.

It earned a Grammy nomination for its score and has been sampled by generations of hip-hop producers since. Plenty of soundtracks sell a film; this one has spent fifty years politely upstaging it.

Also at Kops: more Curtis Mayfield on vinyl · browse 70s Soul On Up

Tracklist

Listen

On Curtom / Rhino (cat# R1 524044), a reissue of the 1972 soundtrack.