Curtis Mayfield DVD review
-
Artist:
-
Album:Movin' On Up (DVD)
-
Track:(Don't Worry) If There's A Hell Below, We're All Gonna Go
I've been talking about this review for a while, and here's the finished product.Movin' On Up: The Music And Message Of Curtis Mayfield & The ImpressionsDirector: David Peck, Phil Galloway, Tom Gulotta, Rob BowmanCast: Curtis Mayfield, Altheida Mayfield, Sam Gooden, Fred Cash, Johnny Pate, Andrew Young, Carlos Santana, Chuck D(2008) Rated: UnratedUS DVD release date: 6 May 2008 (Hip-O)by Jennifer Kelly Most people, asked to name a Curtis Mayfield song, will come up with something from Superfly, the superlative title track, spectrally funky “Freddy’s Dead” or the ethereally ominous “Pusherman”, all classics of the ‘70s funk era. There’s no question that these are great songs, full of biting social commentary and lacerating funk grooves. Yet for Mayfield, a serious, thoughtful man with long roots in the civil rights movement, it must have rankled that his best, most commercially successful songs were from the soundtrack to scenes of drug abuse and social degradation. Ironic, yes, that the soul singer dubbed ‘the preacher” or “the reverend”, whose luminous “People Get Ready” became an unofficial anthem of the Freedom Rides, should be so closely associated with the fallout years, that post-Vietnam period when heroin took over the black neighborhoods. Movin’ On Up, an expansive documentary, tells both halves of these interlocking stories: the early years when Mayfield, along with Impressions Fred Cash and Sam Gooden sang high, eerie harmonies about a better world; and the later ones when his incendiary funk band sketched a nightmare scenario of poverty, dysfunction and crime. The split for Mayfield, as for many soul musicians, came in 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. “Curtis who had sung about the triumph and the glory of us coming together as a people was now faced with a reality that I was faced with. Life without a Martin Luther King. Life without a Robert Kennedy. Life without a John Kennedy or a Malcolm X,” says Andrew Young, in an interview. “All of these were people who were voices of hope and they shared a vision. And we’ve been floundering ever since in some ways.” More here: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/film/reviews/57602/movin-on-up/
Comments (7)