Artist: Curtis Mayfield · Album: Superfly · Year: 1972 · Label: Curtom · Rank: 76 / 500
You can watch Super Fly the film and enjoy the clothes, the cars, the grainy 70s grit. But you don’t really understand that world until you hear Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack. Where the movie sometimes glamorizes the dealer life, the album turns into a Greek chorus: warning, mourning, and testifying over some of the most luxurious funk ever pressed to vinyl.
Funk on Velvet, Stories on Razor Blades
Sonically, Superfly is gorgeous: wah-wah guitars, buttery strings, congas, horns that glide instead of shout. Mayfield’s falsetto is feather-light on the surface, but there’s steel in the way he delivers every line.
“Little Child Runnin’ Wild” opens the record with weary compassion – not a sermon, but a resigned sigh at a kid trying to navigate poverty and chaos. “Freddie’s Dead” is even tougher: a character study of a doomed hustler laid over an irresistible groove. Dance if you want, but he’s not letting you pretend this ends well.
Counter-Narrative to Blaxploitation
The brilliance of the album is how it plays against the movie that birthed it. Onscreen, drug dealers are stylish antiheroes; in Mayfield’s lyrics, they’re trapped. “Pusherman” is one of the most seductive tracks here – those hi-hats, that bassline – but the lyric is ice cold: “I’m your doctor when in need / Want some coke? Have some weed.” It’s a job description, not a flex.
Mayfield gives the streets a voice, but never confuses survival with glory. His politics are clear: systems create these roles, and everyone pays the cost.
Arrangements with a Conscience
Listen to how he arranges space. The rhythm section is tight but unhurried, leaving room for strings to float and guitars to chatter. Tracks like “Give Me Your Love (Love Song)” ride a sensual, almost cosmic R&B vibe, while “No Thing on Me (Cocaine Song)” feels like a small moment of resistance – asserting that staying clean is also a form of rebellion.
The songs work completely outside of the film; you can treat the record as a concept album about temptation, capitalism, and the cost of ambition.
Legacy
Superfly essentially invents a lane: socially conscious funk that can sit in the same playlist as party records without losing its message. The sampling history is endless – everyone from hip-hop producers to neo-soul bands has raided this record.
Put it on now and it still feels contemporary: the stories haven’t aged, and neither has that slow, stalking groove that made Curtis Mayfield the soft-spoken moral center of 70s soul.