超级苍蝇原声带 (1972)

Super Fly is the third studio album by American soul musician Curtis Mayfield, released on July 11, 1972, by Curtom Records as the soundtrack for the blaxploitation film of the same name. The album was Mayfield's first full soundtrack, and his third solo effort since leaving the Impressions. Super Fly was a commercial success, peaking at number 1 on the Billboard Top 200 and selling over 500,000 copies in the United States, with an estimated 1.5 million sold in total. Super Fly outsold the film it accompanied, with performance bolstered by Hot 100 top 10 singles "Freddie's Dead" and title track "Superfly".

The critical and commercial success of Super Fly led to its nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media at the 15th Annual Grammy Awards, losing to Nino Rota's The Godfather (1971). Super Fly remains one of only three blaxploitation soundtracks to be nominated for a Grammy, alongside Isaac Hayes Jr.'s Shaft (1971) and the Norman Whitfield/Rose Royce collaboration Car Wash (1977). Due to the soundtrack's success, Mayfield was tapped to produce several film soundtracks over the course of the decade in collaboration with high-profile soul artists such as Gladys Knight & The Pips, The Staples Singers, and Aretha Franklin.

Super Fly was one of the first soul concept albums. It was noted for its stark lyrics about poverty and drug abuse, which were informed both by Mayfield's disagreements with the film's neutral treatment of drugs and drug dealers and his personal experiences growing up around the dangers of both. The album is frequently sampled and interpolated by modern artists, and represents "one of the high watermarks of arguably the most fertile and creative era in soul music’s history". For its lyrical messaging and influence on both contemporary soul and the nascent genres of hip-hop and rap, the album is often cited as one of the best albums of all time.

Background

Mayfield had previously contributed two songs to Krakatoa, East of Java, which marked his first foray into soundtrack work. Following his departure from The Impressions in 1970 and his first solo releases Curtis (1970) and Roots (1971), Mayfield's next soundtrack project began with a suggestion from Gordon Parks Jr. Parks – son of Shaft director Gordon Parks – was working on Super Fly as his directorial debut and asked Mayfield and his backing band to cameo in a scene as a nightclub act in the background. Parks wanted a full song to play in the scene, which led to the beginning of soundtrack sessions.

Production and release

The recording session for the song "Pusherman" took place at Bell Sound Studios in New York, followed by a months-long hiatus while Mayfield focused on other projects (writing The Impressions' Times Have Changed and working on his own album, Back to the World). The instrumentals for the remaining songs were produced in a three-day session at a former RCA studio in Chicago, which involved an in-studio band of as many as 40 performers. Regarding the recording environment, Guitarist Craig McMullen states, "The advantage of it is, if you have a full orchestra, when you place your licks, you don't have to worry about your licks bumping. You can hear everything that's going to go down."

The album was primarily written by Mayfield from a basement apartment in Chicago while undergoing a trial separation from his wife and children. Mayfield drew on his own experience to relate to the film and so inform his songwriting, telling Rolling Stone "I didn't have to leave my neighborhood to understand what Super Fly was about." Mayfield was at odds with how the pitfalls of drug use were addressed by the film - per his second wife, Altheida Mayfield, "Curtis thought ‘Super Fly’ was a commercial to sell cocaine and he wanted to turn that around. That was his main purpose there, to say ‘This is nothing pretty.’". This informed the album's lyrics, which were centered on the ills of a culture that the film depicted on more ambiguous terms.

Super Fly was originally released in 1972 on Curtom Records in both LP and eight-track formats, three weeks prior to the release of the accompanying film, with additional distribution handled throughout Europe and Asia by Buddah Records.The release was complicated by a dispute with arranger Johnny Pate over songwriting credit on the song "Think", which would mark the end of Mayfield and Pate's working relationship. On November 11, 1997, Rhino Records released a 25th Anniversary collection of the album with a bonus disc of demo versions of songs, radio spots, and interviews with Mayfield discussing his writing process, and a 1999 reissue of the album included new mixes of "Freddie's Dead" and "Superfly" as bonus tracks.