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Shaft: Isaac Hayes' Revolutionary
Soundtrack
By Michael A.
Gonzales
Behind every great
music critic is an indulgent parent. You know, that long
suffering parental unit who didn’t scream when you
temporarily changed your forename to Vicious or Elton
(as I did in the fifth grade), didn’t curse you out when
you blasted reruns of The Partridge Family and treated
them as though they were real relatives — nor did they
have a heart attack when you wore your grandma’s wig
while pretending to be the Beatles.
In any case, it was my codependent mom who kept me
supplied with enough pop life-stimulants to get hooked
on spinning black vinyl forever. From bingeing on glossy
fan magazines (Tiger Beat, Right On!) to
overdosing on a prized 7” of Queen’s painfully beautiful
“Somebody to Love” and blaring the latest orchestrated
Gamble & Huff production, Mom made sure her baby boy had
his fix.
Still, no matter how many blunts have been passed over
the years, I’ll never forget that fall day in 1971 when
I was eight years old and my black wax supplier brought
me my first album: Isaac Hayes’s majestic
soundtrack for Shaft.
Even though I had not seen the movie, the lyrical
storyteller in Hayes brilliant single brought the
character to life for me. At the time, I had no idea
Isaac was a bad mother who had helped build the sonic
brick house of Stax Records in the Sixties. Along with
his then-writing partner David Porter, the duo composed
some 200 songs under the name the Soul Children. Reeling
off a string of hits for Stax luminaries like Sam & Dave
("Soul Man" and "Hold On, I'm Comin'"), Carla Thomas
("B-A-B-Y") and Johnnie Taylor ("I Got to Love
Somebody's Baby," "I Had a Dream"), these boys had the
Midas touch for gutbucket soul.
Indeed, my introduction to the musical magic of Isaac
Hayes was the hypnotic hi-hat intro and the watery
wah-wah guitar of the title track “Theme from Shaft.” A
funky overture that baptized the nation with the nectar
of muddy waters of Memphis, the song was played on a
zillion radio stations, hitting #1 on both the pop and
R&B charts. Still, no matter how many times the track
was pumped over the airwaves, I wasn’t content until it
was spinning on my own clunky stereo.
Though it might be hard to believe today, in the
post-civil rights era of 1971, there were no black super
heroes seen on screen. But once that badass black
private dick swung through the tenement windows of urban
American pop culture, we too had a champion to call our
own. Before the blaxploitation days of swaggering
sisters and mumbling macks, the boys in the ’hood had to
be content with pretending to be either Bond or Batman
(I don’t even want to think about the amount of times I
was forced to KA-POW! my little brother for refusing to
play Robin).
Shaft was directed by former Life magazine
photographer Gordon Parks, whose gritty pictorials of
rowdy Harlem street gangs and roguish Chicago detectives
proved he had the right eye to convey the hard rock
dynamics of the titular character. As the Negro link
between John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese, the
masterful Parks used the romantic decay of Seventies New
York City as the perfect character, and not merely a
backdrop.
Hearing Haye’s ultra-cool “Theme from Shaft” as actor
Richard Roundtree strutted past the B-movie marquees in
Times Square or the tense “Walk From Regio’s” as he
strolled through Greenwich Village was enough to make
this Manhattan-centric uptown boy drool with Big Apple
delight.
After Quincy Jones, who had constructed jazzy scores for
a handful of Sidney Lumet films (his exciting music from
The Anderson Tapes was a favorite), Isaac was
only the second black man to compose a major Hollywood
soundtrack.
“Having never written a score before, I was a little
nervous that I would mess up,” he admitted in a 1995
interview. Yet, in a record-breaking four days, holed-up
in a MGM recording studio with studio rats the Bar-Kays
and the Memphis Strings & Horns, brother Hayes created a
funky template that later inspired the soulful musings
of
Curtis Mayfield (Super
Fly),
Marvin Gaye (Trouble
Man),
James Brown (Black
Caesar) and
Willie Hutch (The
Mack). After
Shaft, black film soundtracks would never be the
same.
Still, not everyone was as thrilled by symphonic soul
and bawdy lyrics as I was — least of all my third grade
teacher, Miss Wilson. Attending a proper Negro private
academy called the Modern School, we were expected to be
perfect ladies and gentleman at all times. Needless to
say, this was easier for some than others.
Though the Modern School was in the heart of the ’hood,
it was the kind of classy joint where the teachers
played Mozart during lunch. I had once been forced to
prance on stage at the Audubon Ballroom (the same spot
where Malcolm X was slain) in black ballet slippers and
colorful balloons tied to wrists while the Fifth
Dimensions wailed “Up, Up and Away.” Forget about Martin
Luther King’s dream — this was his acid trip.
Every Friday afternoon our class was encouraged to bring
their own music to school to play for the other
students. Of course, I couldn’t wait to share the wicked
Shaft soundtrack with the class. Regally sitting at a
paper cluttered desk, Miss Wilson instructed me to walk
over to the antiquated stereo — I think the needle was
made of wood — and put on the disc.
Yet, once Isaac sang the songs raunchy (by ’71
standards) first line, “Who's the black private dick
that's a sex machine to all the chicks? (SHAFT!) Ya damn
right!” the fun was over. Clad in a quaint print dress
and an ill-fitting wig, light-skinned Miss Wilson leapt
from her paper-cluttered desk and sprinted across the
carpeted floor like Wilma Rudolph. “What kind of music
is this supposed to be?” she screamed, accidentally
scratching the needle across the wax. Cringing as Miss
Wilson ruined my record, I was stunned by her blushing
reaction.
Carelessly shoving the damaged record back into its
sleeve, Miss Wilson curtly dropped the album cover on my
desk. Having regained her buppie composure, she hovered
for a moment before screeching through clinched teeth.
“Please, don’t bring anything like this to class ever
again.”
The following year, at the 1972 Academy Awards, Isaac
Hayes’
revolutionary soundtrack won an Oscar for Best
Score.
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michael a. gonzales--Harlem native
-- has written cover stories for
Essence, Giant, Latina, XXL and
Stop Smiling. A former writer-at-large for Vibe
magazine, Gonzales has also been a staff writer for
The Source, columnist for New York Press and
a frequent contributor to the New York Daily News,
the New York Post and NY Metro. He has
also contributed articles to Spin, the Village
Voice, Ego Trip, Trace and
Entertainment Weekly.
Gonzales co-wrote
the book
Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and
Hip-Hop Culture (Random House, 1991).
Praised by
writer/director Nelson George as “evidencing the mastery
of detail required of a subject that is all about
mastery of detail,” the book was a groundbreaking text
in hip-hop literature. |
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Currently Michael
A. Gonzales writes a regular music column called “On the
Corner” for
Popmatters.com and has written liner-notes for
reissue collections including The Hip-Hop Box Set,
the O’Jays, the Gap Band, the Crusaders and Al Green.
Having written for MTV and BET, he also served as a
consultant to the Experience Music Project’s (Seattle)
inaugural Hip-Hop/Rap exhibit. He also contributed the
essay “From Rockin’ the House to Planet Rock” to their
catalogue Crossroads (2000).
In addition,
Gonzales’ essays have appeared in
Best Sex Writing 2005 edited by Violet Blue (Cleis
Press),
Beats, Rhymes & Life edited by Kenji Jasper
(Harlem Moon, 2007) and
Best Sex Writing 2006 edited Felice Neaman and
Frederique Delacoste (Cleis Press). A 1999 Code magazine
feature on Prince was reprinted the following year in
the landmark music criticism collection
Rock and Roll is Here to Stay edited by William
McKeen (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000). “My Father Named
Me Prince” appeared alongside pop culture pieces by Tom
Wolfe, Joan Didion and Lester Bangs.
Gonzales has
published fiction in
Brown Sugar 2: A Collection of Erotic Black Fiction
edited by Carol Taylor (Simon & Shuster, 2001),
Bronx Biannual 2 edited by Miles Marshall
Lewis (Akashic Books, 2007), Uptown magazine,
Brown Sugar 3: When Opposites Attract edited by
Carol Taylor (Simon & Shuster, 2003) and the upcoming
superheroes collection Darker Mask edited by Gary
Phillips and Christopher Chambers (Tor, 2008).
Gonzales’ short
stories have also been published in France and England.
Like Gypsy Rose Lee, Norman Mailer and Spike Lee before
him, he lives in Brooklyn.
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Generation Soul: Can Dru Hill Revive The Vocal
Group?
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02_My_Story,_My_Song.mp3
(24503 KB)
(Kalamu reading "My Story, My Song"
Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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