Super Fly and the Sound of Seventies Blaxploitation Cinema

Abstract

This chapter deals with a brief consideration of Super Fly sampling in hip-hop, which continues to take up blaxploitation cinema as a technologically mediated mode of music production beyond the film cycle’s own cultural ascension and rapid decline. In the early 1970s, Super Fly traversed the entertainment industrial complex via radio transmission, televisual broadcast, and theatrical film exhibition. As Curtis Mayfield’s success with Super Fly shows, popular black musicians and blaxploitation film-makers shared a vested interest in soundtrack albums. Super Fly the album and Super Fly the film each open with the bass and organ-driven track “Little Child Runnin’ Wild.” Locating Super Fly within the musical, cultural, and physical landscape helps to more thoroughly understand why, in the early 1970s, blaxploitation music became the pop culture symptom, signifier, and synecdoche par excellence of a new ghetto-chic style. Less explicitly gun-like on “Little Child,” though no less militant sounding, this musical derivation signals the political underpinnings of Mayfield’s song beyond its lyrics.