Curtis Mayfield's Super Fly soundtrack, issued in 1972 on his own Curtom label, is the rare film album that argues with the picture it accompanies. The Library of Congress essay written for the album's National Recording Registry selection calls it "a subversive dissonant—a counter story" to a movie about a cocaine dealer. Mayfield wrote, produced and performed all nine songs.
The work
- Album: Super Fly (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), 1972
- Songwriter, producer and performer: Curtis Mayfield
- Arranger: Johnny Pate
- Label: Curtom, Mayfield's own imprint
- Film: Super Fly, directed by Gordon Parks Jr., released by Warner Bros.
- Basis of coverage: the Library of Congress National Recording Registry essay, NPR's report on the registry class, Rolling Stone's account of the album's making, and Variety's interview about the 2018 remake soundtrack
A note on what follows: this piece treats the Curtom album as released, not the score as edited into the finished film. The two are not the same object, and the sources describe the record.
How does an album end up arguing with its own film?
It begins with an invitation that was smaller than the job it became. Director Gordon Parks Jr. asked Mayfield and his band to appear in the film as a nightclub act — source music, the music that exists inside the story world and is audible to the characters — and the assignment grew from there into the full soundtrack, according to Rolling Stone's account of the album's making. Mayfield began writing late in 1971.
What he wrote did not flatter the story he had been hired to accompany. The registry essay describes songs that address the exploitation at the heart of drug culture, the poverty that feeds it, and the alternatives available to the people caught in it — a set of lyrics pointed at the same milieu the film renders as style. Mayfield named the model he was working from. "I was very influenced by Marvin [Gaye's] 'What's Going On' album," he said in a remark quoted in the Library's essay.
The sequencing of the release sharpened the effect. Rolling Stone reports that the soundtrack reached the public roughly a month before the film did, in August 1972, which meant that a considerable number of listeners met Mayfield's commentary on the story before they met the story. The album was not an accessory to the picture. It arrived first and set the terms.
What did the sessions actually involve?
They were brief, and they were split between two cities. The Library of Congress essay records that the album was cut in three days in Chicago, with the exception of "Pusherman," which was taped at Bell Sound Studios in New York. Johnny Pate is credited as the album's arranger — a distinct job from Mayfield's, and one the credits keep separate: the arranger determines how a written song is voiced across the players in the room.
The label matters as much as the studios. Super Fly was a Warner Bros. picture, but the soundtrack came out on Curtom, the imprint Mayfield owned, which is why a record so unwilling to endorse its film could be released without being softened first. The commercial arrangement and the editorial one line up: the artist who wrote the counter-story also controlled the release that carried it.
It is worth being precise about the form. The album is nine songs, all of them written by Mayfield, rather than a sequence of cues — a cue being a discrete piece of music written to sit under a specific stretch of picture. A soundtrack built from songs carries words, and words can take a position; underscore, as a rule, cannot argue in sentences. That formal choice is inseparable from the record's reputation, because the counter story the Library's essay identifies is carried in lyrics about pushers, poverty and the people who do not survive the trade. The record's most quoted title is a death notice.
Did the charts agree with it?
Comprehensively. According to the registry essay, "Superfly" reached No. 8 pop and No. 5 R&B and sold more than a million copies; "Freddie's Dead" went to No. 4 pop and No. 2 R&B; "Give Me Your Love" reached No. 31 pop. Rolling Stone notes that the album became the only No. 1 pop album of Mayfield's career, a distinction that a man with two prior No. 1 R&B albums had not previously held.
The awards were less agreeable. Rolling Stone records four Grammy nominations for the project and no wins, and reports that "Freddie's Dead" was ruled ineligible for a 1973 Academy Award nomination. Mayfield's response, given to the Chicago Tribune and quoted in that account, was unsparing: he was glad, he said, to be in a position to let everybody see what the Academy Awards are — "a personalized social club with exclusive members." The line reads as the same voice that wrote the songs, applied to a different institution.
What did the Library of Congress preserve?
The album itself, as a recording. Super Fly was named to the National Recording Registry in the class documented as 2018, and NPR reported the announcement of that group of twenty-five recordings in March 2019, listing Mayfield's soundtrack among the year's selections. The Library published an essay on the album alongside the selection.
That essay is the reason so much of the record's making is documentable at all: the three-day session, the New York exception, the arranger's credit, the chart positions, the Marvin Gaye remark. A soundtrack album that outsold and outlasted the film it served is now archived on its own terms rather than the film's — catalogued as a recording, described as a counter story, and preserved with its origins written down.
What happened when the film came back?
A remake arrived in 2018, directed by Director X, and its soundtrack was executive produced by Future, who is also credited as a producer on the film. The album runs to thirteen tracks, ten of them featuring Future, with appearances from Young Thug, Lil Wayne, Miguel, H.E.R. and 21 Savage, and it includes reprises of Mayfield compositions. Future assembled it in roughly a month while the picture was shooting.
He described the assignment as an intimidating one. "At the beginning I was very nervous, because it's the foundation for a lifestyle, for a culture," he told Variety, adding that Mayfield's music "means so much for me." His stated aim was continuity without imitation: "I want to be able to take my music, keeping that same Future sound, but feel like I grew and matured in a way where I didn't lose the connection."
The nervousness is instructive. What a 2018 soundtrack inherits from 1972 is not a set of chord changes but a precedent — the idea that the record attached to a film about a dealer is permitted to hold an opinion about him. Mayfield established that precedent in three days of Chicago sessions, plus one song cut earlier in a New York studio at the end of 1971, months before the rest of the album existed.
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