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Earth, Wind & Fire/Melvin Van Peebles (Sweetback Soundtrack) Today the legendary Memphis label Stax Records, currently an imprint of Concord Music, reissues the soundtrack of Melvin Van Peebles’ landmark 1971 film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song as part of a series celebrating Stax’s 60th anniversary. Van Peebles, who wrote, produced, directed and starred in the film when he was thirty-nine, also conceived and performed the soundtrack in collaboration with a then-unknown jazz/funk band called Earth, Wind and Fire. “Maurice [White, E,W&F leader] was good friends with Melvin, so he asked us to be involved in the project,” his brother and bass player Verdine White explains. “We were supposed to be paid $500, but that check bounced around the world.” In his book In the Space of a Song: The Uses of Song in Film, Brit critic Richard Dyer wrote “The (Sweetback) score is somewhere between a rather raw free form jazz and the funky riffs that Earth, Wind and Fire would become famous for, as well as supporting our sense of Sweetback’s energy and mobility, the formal qualities of Earth, Wind and Fire’s music also support a sense of his persistence, as the music itself persists, endlessly flexible in its reinvention of itself.” Just as the Sweetback was subversive, so was its soundtrack.
“The music in Sweetback is like the title character’s subconscious we’re eavesdropping on,” explains pulp fiction author (Dillon) and film aficionado Derrick Ferguson. “It’s not just background music. It’s enhancing what we’re seeing on screen and it strikes me as being very stream-of-consciousness, giving us insight into what Sweetback is feeling and thinking. Especially the track “Come On Feet.” Music from the soundtrack has been sampled by Schoolboy Q. (Raymond 1969”/“Break That Party & Opening”), Main Source (”Live at the Barbeque”/“The Man Tries Running His Usual Game but Sweetback’s Jones Is So Strong He…”) and Eric B. & Rakim (”Kick Along”/”Come on Feet do Your Thing”).
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I have this CD.Hard,gritty,early 70s funk.....I love it | |
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! I hate those rubber checks. Incidentally,