Mayfield stakes out his position clearly: pushing dope for The Man is bad, and, as he sings in No Thing On Me, “You want it funky, but you don’t have to be no junkie”. In the case of the latter, Mayfield went as far subverting the tone of the movie, which took an agnostic view on the morality of the drug trade. Some of these soundtracks are rightly famous: Isaac Hayes’ Shaft, Bobby Womack’s Across 110 th Street, Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man, Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly. It is a happy circumstance that the era of Blaxploitation - roughly 1968 to 1978 - coincided with a creatively fertile period in soul and funk music. Some have greater artistic merit and production values than others, but the soundtracks tend to be quite outstanding, regardless of the quality of the movie. Especially as time capsules of a particular time and setting, even the less brilliant ones are fascinating. I have enjoyed some films in that genre, including the gritty street movies. There were also flicks of comedy, horror, martial arts, nostalgia, musical and so on. It wasn’t all movies about gritty drug dealers, pimps, junkies, vigilantes and private dicks who are bad mutha-shut-your-mouths, the kind which Quentin Tarantino would later appropriate and fetishize. But there cannot be no blanket opinion about a genre that had many sub-genres. I wouldn’t like to offer my opinion on those arguments because, as a white man, it isn’t my place to do so. The NAACP was critical of many those movies, seeing unwelcome racial stereotypes and a glorification of crime and violence in them, while other leaders saw these movies as vehicles for Black Pride.
There are lots of opinions about Blaxploitation movies: some see them as having given African-Americans a presence in film that previously had been lacking others see them as a denigration of black dignity, much like gangsta rap in the 1990s. Last month filmmaker and musician Melvin Van Peebles died, so this is a good time to launch a mix of music from the Blaxploitation genre which Van Peebles helped pioneer with his 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
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