Curtis Mayfield

(June 3, 1942-December 26, 1999)

All the good people are dying, and we're not going to be able to replace them. Curtis Mayfield made some of the best soul music of the 20th century, and his passing was no more than a blip on our Y2K-compliant cultural screens. When Frank Sinatra died, a nation mourned. With all due respect to Sinatra, Mayfield was no less great. But he was a lot less white.

What sets Mayfield's songs apart from other soul music is the message. Mayfield told Los Angeles Times pop critic Robert Hilburn in 1973, "I'm not singing protest; I'm only singing about the actual reality of what's going on around us."

His accepted masterwork, the 1972 Superfly soundtrack, contains three original songs which exemplify Mayfield's gift for integrating the groove and the evocation of "actual reality": "Freddie's Dead," "Superfly," and "Pusherman." He had honed his ability to convey meaning in verse to a sublime economy, as in "So you wanna be a junkie/wow/Remember Freddie's dead." The "wow" is hardly superfluous: It implies disbelief at the self-inflicted degradation of the black community. That's a lot for a three-letter word.

While an instrumental version of "Pusherman" is now used to peddle cars in television ads, the original song fused the unshakable three-chord hook with an explanation of ghetto drama: "For a generous fee/Make your world/What you want it to be/Got a woman I love desperately/Wanna give her somethin' better than me/Been told I can't be nuthin' else/Just a hustler in spite of myself."

Mayfield was able to express in song a prevalent feeling, important to understanding the post-civil-rights black experience: being trapped in the ghetto. Mayfield was alive to the fact that, from the inside, it felt like the only way for a black man to make enough money to "get over" was to deal drugs.

Today, the way to get out of the ghetto is to sample a Mayfield beat and rhyme over it. So if you do lift from Mayfield, don't defile it by rapping about nothing: Any rap that's ironic and mocking of all sentiment (this means you, Beck!), and any rap that is merely gibberish (oh my god, this means Beck, too!), in short, anything devoid of meaning or message, is tantamount to spitting on the grave of a legendary artist.

One of my favorite Mayfield songs is "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Down Below, We're All Gonna Go." When Mayfield sings, "They say don't worry," you know you better worry. In the aftermath of civil rights, white people don't worry about institutionalized racism -- they assume the problem is fixed. But, as a friend of mine likes to say, "If you want to end racism, don't be racist." If there is a hell, we're all gonna go for being so caught up in our new Beck albums that we ignored the passing of the great Curtis Mayfield.