Super Fly

The sessions began at the end of 1971, when Gordon Parks Jr. asked Mayfield and his band to appear in the film as a nightclub act and needed a finished song for the scene. Mayfield took the band to New York, cut Pusherman at Bell Sound Studios at night, and the scene was shot the next day. Months passed while he wrote an Impressions album and conceived Back to the World. The rest of the soundtrack was then recorded in Chicago over three days. Everything but Mayfield's vocals was cut live, with as many as 40 musicians in the room, and Johnny Pate arranged the orchestra. Engineer Roger Anfinsen said the idea was to capture a live energy. Mayfield wrote most of the songs in the basement apartment of a three-story building he owned in Chicago.

Mayfield said that when he saw the film he thought of it as a cocaine infomercial, and he wrote the music and lyrics as a commentary running alongside it. His wife Altheida Mayfield recalled that he wanted to turn the film around and say that this was nothing pretty. Curtom released the LP and an eight-track edition on 11 July 1972, three weeks before the film. A dispute with the arranger Johnny Pate over the songwriting credit for the instrumental Think ended their working relationship.

Reception

It reached number one on the Billboard Top 200, spent four weeks there, and was certified gold by the RIAA within three months. It outsold the film. Freddie's Dead and the title track Superfly both reached the Hot 100 top 10. At the 15th Annual Grammy Awards it was nominated for best score soundtrack for visual media and lost to Nino Rota's score for The Godfather.

Rolling Stone's Bob Donat wrote in 1972 that it was the best of Mayfield's four albums since leaving the Impressions. Alexis Petridis of the Guardian wrote that it was less a soundtrack than a concept album inspired by a film. Mychal Denzel Smith of Pitchfork called it the best soundtrack of the blaxploitation genre. Rolling Stone ranked it number 69 in its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums. Rhino issued a 25th anniversary edition on 11 November 1997 with a bonus disc of demos, radio spots and interviews, and a 1999 reissue added new mixes of two songs. Chuck D of Public Enemy said in a 2008 documentary that Mayfield's words just meant everything.