The easy comparison would be to say that Curtis Mayfield's Super Fly is like Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul, because these are two titans of soul music at the top of their game. I love the sounds and textured in this specific type of soul music—the excess of strings, the falsetto vocals, the funky rhythms with syncopated drums and bongos, the tension between the inhuman amounts of cool and the creeping sense of dread. Keep it coming.
A different comparison would be to say that Curtis Mayfield's Super Fly is like the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, because they function in the same way in relation to the movie that they connected to. I talked about how the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever was interesting because it featured the best sounds of disco, while the movie portrayed that sound as a death rattle. Same juxtaposition here, but in reverse. Super Fly the album is about cycles of poverty and violence, and the merciless grip that the drug trade has on those trapped in these cycles. Super Fly the movie is about a drug dealer trying to make one last steal and then escape the game forever. The characters on the album are at best on the periphery of the movie.
That's interesting to me, how asynchronous a soundtrack and a film can be, even when the artist on the soundtrack portrays himself in the film, singing a song from the soundtrack. It's almost like Curtis Mayfield knew that this film was going to be labeled "Blaxploitation" and was doing his best to pull it back from the brink. He miraculously succeeds; I liked Super Fly, but probably only because the soundtrack was so goddamn good.
There's a ongoing conversation about the so-called "blaxploitation films" and their value, a conversation I'm probably not qualified to engage in. There's an argument that films like Super Fly did more harm than good by perpetuating racist stereotypes, by consistently portraying black people as pimps, drug dealers, criminals. The counterargument is that it was revolutionary that the central characters in these films were black, that the very idea of black characters being front and center, no matter how they were portrayed, is a net positive.
Like I said, it's not my place to say, but I will say that, to my ears, Curtis Mayfield is doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to that counterargument. Super Fly the album is a poignant look at the struggle, whereas Super Fly the film is content to glamorize that struggle. Had the soundtrack featured songs about how cool the neighborhood coke dealer was, I don't think we'd be talking about Super Fly right now. But the fact is that the soundtrack was able to undercut a lot of the cheap thrills of the movie by being honest and real about how dire the situation really was. And still is, if I myself am being honest about it. That is the legacy of Super Fly. That's why it lives on.
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