On this day in 1972, Curtis Mayfield made history with the release of Super Fly, which spent four weeks atop the Billboard 200 and remains one of the artist’s most important and enduring pieces of work.
The album was released as the soundtrack to Gordon Parks Jr.‘s blaxploitation classic of the same name, which starred Ron O’Neil as a cocaine dealer looking to right his life’s wrongs before scoring one final job. Over the years, however, Mayfield’s music has eclipsed the movie in terms of popularity.
The soundtrack album features hits such as “Freddie’s Dead” and “Superfly”, which both broke into the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 4 and No. 8, respectively. Even today, they remain the best-selling and highest-charting singles of Mayfield’s entire solo career.
Mayfield was chosen to write and perform the music for Super Fly due to the success of his previous solo singles, “(Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go”, and “Move on Up”. He had previously been renowned as the frontman of The Impressions, but this album allowed him to forge his own identity as a master of the soul genre.
The record was an unprecedented success. It’s estimated to have sold upwards of 500,000 copies in the United Kingdom, with a further 1,000,000 sold around the world. The record ended up outperforming the film it accompanied, and Mayfield quickly became a critical darling for his raw, socially conscious writing and vibrant vocal performances.
The album received huge attention for its lyrics about drug abuse and poverty, which led many critics to accurately characterize it as one of the first-ever instances of a concept album within the soul genre. Mayfield himself later expressed that he felt a responsibility to accurately portray these themes due to his disagreement with how the accompanying film explored them in a more neutral and less critical way.
In 2020, Mayfield’s timeless soul record was named by Rolling Stone on the publication’s famous list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It was ranked No. 76 on the list, just behind classic records such as Lady Soul by Aretha Franklin and The College Dropout by Kanye West.
