Pusherman

I am always on the lookout for clear examples of blue thirds, pitches in between the standard equal-tempered major and minor thirds. I heard Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” recently, and the vocal melody grabbed my ear. (Be advised that the first verse uses the n-word.)

You can hear the pitches in the vocal melody even more clearly in the acapella.

Curtis’ vocal melody is mainly in F minor pentatonic, but he consistently bends the A-flat some or most of the way up to A-natural to make blue thirds. When you look at my chart, know that the notes in blue are really between A-flat and A-natural.

(I didn’t transcribe the hand percussion because I don’t know how I would begin to represent it within Noteflight’s limitations.)

To get a more exact read on Curtis’ pitch, I put the acapella into Melodyne. Here’s a phrase from measures 18-20, which I screencapped and annotated with lyrics. The squiggly lines are the actual sung pitches, while the blobs are Melodyne’s attempt to abstract those pitches into discrete notes.

There are three blue thirds in this phrase: on the first syllable of “doctor”, on “need”, and on “coke.”

• The syllable “doc” swoops down and then up, peaking on a very flat A-natural.
• The word “need” swoops up from “you” and then down, briefly stabilizing at its peak on the exact halfway point between A-flat and A-natural.
• The word “coke” is yet another up-and-down swoop, peaking on a slightly sharp A-flat. 

Each melodic peak in this line is very slightly flatter than the one before it. Whether that was an expressive choice on Curtis’ part or just the way that those pitches happened to come out, I don’t know.

While Curtis’ vocal melody is minor(-ish), the instrumental backing is mostly in F Mixolydian. The guitar parts are played by Curtis and Craig McMullen, though I don’t know who plays which part. Under the verse, one guitar part doubles the bass, while the other plays a lovely pair of chords. On the chart, I labeled them Dm/F and Cm/F, but you could also think of them as F6 and F9(no 3rd). After the verse, the wah-wah guitar plays F7 while the other guitar plays the F minor(-ish) pentatonic vocal melody in octaves. Curtis was famously a self-taught guitarist. He didn’t know how he was supposed to tune it, so he decided to tune to the black keys on the piano: F-sharp, A-sharp, C-sharp, F-sharp, A-sharp, F-sharp. He used this open F-sharp tuning throughout his career. 

Blaxploitation is one of the foundational stylistic cornerstones of hip-hop, and about a thousand rap songs reference or quote “Pusherman”. There have been a lot of remixes too. My favorite is the Reflex Re-vision.

Mixmaster Mike’s flip is creative, but it doesn’t quite land for me.

In Super Fly, “Pusherman” is laid over what Steve Ryfle calls the film’s “most controversial sequence, a montage of stills showing Priest and his drug-dealing crew unapologetically selling and snorting their product with customers of different races, classes, and orientations.” You could see the movie as glamorizing all of this, but the song lyrics are ambivalent. Eithne Quinn describes the track as working “both to parody and legitimate black (sub)cultural enterprise.” The film is itself a subcultural enterprise; Quinn points out that Youngblood Priest’s Cadillac El Dorado (the pimpmobile referenced in the song as “my El-D”) belongs to the actual Harlem pimp K.C., who was one of the film’s financial backers and who appears in it as a pimp.

The Super Fly soundtrack has been referenced and parodied so many times that it’s hard to even hear it now. I don’t know that I’ve ever even watched a Blaxploitation movie in its entirety, and yet every time I see a pimpmobile in my neighborhood, I get flooded with pop-cultural associations. The wah-wah pedal is a lazy shorthand for that kind of sensual sleaziness. There is nothing intrinsic to the sound of a movable bandpass filter to suggest anything related to sex, drugs, or crime, but somehow the vocalistic quality that it gives to the guitar is enough to make the connection. The sense of disreputableness is what initially attracted me to funk during my long adolescence, but then I started learning more about the music, and meeting more of the culture bearers. Curtis Mayfield grew up in the projects in Chicago and didn’t see anything funny or cartoony about Super Fly’s subject matter at all. This Waxpoetics article has some good quotes.

“I don’t see why people are complaining about the subject of these films,” Curtis Mayfield told Jet magazine in October 1972 in a statement that foreshadows the words of modern-day rappers. “The way you clean up the films is by cleaning up the streets. The music and movies of today are the conditions that exist. You change music and movies by changing the conditions.”

Indeed, Mayfield agreed. “These films were positive for us,” he told me in 1996. “Prior to blaxplotation, we didn’t dare show any intellect in films. The Black characters were always getting killed. But with Shaft and Super Fly, things were different.” Although Mayfield didn’t admit it at the time, his urban blues-soaked lyrics gave the characters emotions and conflicts absent from Phillip Fenty’s screenplay. 

“Coming from Cabrini-Green, those characters reminded me of many people, but first they were just the characters from the script,” Mayfield recalled. “The characters came to life for me the more I read. I had been around and seen certain things, but it was never my intention to blend them with a particular person that I knew. 

“Still, one of the things that impressed me about the character Priest was, in spite of what he did for a living, was the fact that he wanted to get out,” continued Mayfield. “It all locked in when you found out he was a very small [fish] in a very large ocean. That allowed me to speak of this man lyrically as to how people who are fly really behave. I wanted to express things lyrically for what they really were.

When “serious” jazz musicians like Herbie Hancock picked up on the sounds and fashions of funk in the 1970s, some of their fans got upset. Herbie went from dark suits and short hair to dashikis and wah-wah pedals. There was a sense among jazz traditionalists that he had sacrificed his dignity in pursuit of album sales. But is that what happened? Funk has a reputation for being low-class and undignified, but there is nothing undignified about Herbie Hancock, or Curtis Mayfield for that matter. The word “dignity” comes from the Latin dignitatem, meaning “worthiness.” Why does a wah-wah pedal make the music unworthy? Why can’t we shake off our vestigial puritanical history and respect this music properly?