LITMIR.BIZ

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film genre commonly known in its 1970s phase as “blaxploitation.” Usually set in or near the ghetto, these films follow a black protagonist (either male or female, interestingly enough) through an adventure in which white people usually appear only in a subsidiary role: as cops good and bad, as assorted other villains, or as attractive women available to the black male hero. The greatest crossover success of the blaxploitation films was Shaft, also released in 1971. It has been observed that the script was originally written with a white actor in mind, then darkened up to take advantage of the attention following Sweetback.²⁹ The submerged racial crossover behind the genesis of Shaft could seem to damage the film’s projection of an iconic black masculinity because from one essentialist point of view it could be said that this blackness was merely a cloaked whiteness. On the other hand, the implicit equation of black and white masculinities could as well be regarded as allowing black men representational access to the fantasy images of autonomy that had previously been reserved for white men alone.

      For whatever reasons, Shaft improved the status of its hero, turning him from a Van Peebles’ oppressed-victim-turned-revolutionary into an autonomous but more conventional masculine type. John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is a black private detective in New York City; he has an expensive wardrobe in the highest early 1970s style, a luxuriously-appointed apartment in the Village (it has two stories and lots of expensive furnishings), a beautiful girlfriend as well as the occasional pickup, and an unequaled command of sex and violence. We know all this about him almost as soon as the movie begins and Isaac Hayes’s famous title track begins to run. Both the visuals and Hayes’s music tell us so.³⁰

      The first shots of the film show Times Square back in its vibrantly sleazy days. When the hi-hat cymbal enters to begin the song, Shaft is shown emerging from one of the 42nd Street/Broadway subway entrances. The phrase structure and some details of the groove on the soundtrack obviously match the camera shots and the action—the result of editing to the music rather than shaping the music to follow the film. During postproduction, Gordon Parks would receive tapes of Hayes’s soundtrack and then look for material to fit the score: “I sometimes cut something to fit his music . . . And there were times when I said, ‘Wow, I wish I had something here to fit this in—how can we use this.’”³¹ But on vinyl, even without the accompaniment of the film, Hayes creates a notably cinematic quality in his music by establishing and maintaining an “irregular,” desultory quality in his layering of motives and components of the groove.³² Furthermore, the lavish instrumental sound serves double duty by evoking not only the exciting hubbub of the street but also the lush way of life of the title character. In this connection, it is especially worth noticing the unusual proportions of the song’s structure. As it was released on record, the 94 bars of the song break up thusly: introduction, 54 bars; body of the song, 28 bars; closing and outro, 12 bars. The expansive nature of the introduction might be taken as a direct consequence of the song’s location in the film’s opening credit sequence, if it were not for Hayes’s previous success in inventing the extended soul song a few years earlier.³³ In any case, the extended introduction of Shaft was influential because of its accretionary procedure of filling up the groove as well as its clever play with the song’s metrical structure.

      When the body of the song finally begins, Hayes and his backup singers tell us about the dominant characteristics of our hero. The playful call and response of Hayes and his backup is mirrored in the diagrammatic structure of the violin countermelody, which repeats a single phrase with alternating endings:

Isaac Hayes		Backup Singers
Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?
		Shaft!
You’re damn right!Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother, man?
		Shaft!
Can you dig it?Who’s the cat that won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about?
		Shaft!
Right on!They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother-
		Shut your mouth!
But I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft!
		Then we can dig it!
He’s a complicated man, but no one understands him but his woman.
		John Shaft!

      The hypersexism of the portrayal is utterly faithful to the mores of the period: not only is Shaft by nature a Black Power übermensch, he has also taken on some of the characteristics of Hugh Hefner’s ideal playboy as well. This is especially apparent in the film’s two love scenes. The first takes place between Shaft and his woman, at her place, to the accompaniment of a kind of easy-listening jazz sweetened up with a few more “classical” instruments. The second is between Shaft and a white woman he has picked up in a bar, at his bachelor pad (and it really does look like something out of Playboy in the 1960s).³⁴ The representation of Shaft’s rich single existence not only fits well with Playboy style, it also resonates strongly with pre-civil rights black styles that emphasized consumption of luxury items all the more because more durable goods were out of reach by segregationist law and custom.³⁵

      A final twist on black masculinity as represented in the “Theme from Shaft” came from the physical presence of Isaac Hayes himself. His facial hair and phallic shaved head matched his resonant bass voice perfectly, and because his image was foregrounded on his albums, anyone interested in his music would have had ample opportunity to know what he looked like.³⁶ Appearing on the 1972 Academy Awards show bare-chested but for a thick gold chain, Hayes visually epitomized the intense black sexuality that his award-winning song had enacted. But even as Hayes embodied this particular strain of masculinity, the radio’s top-forty list showed that there were critiques and alternatives available as models for black male subjectivity.

      ALTERNATIVE BLACK MASCULINITIES

      The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” was released a year after Shaft and represents an implicit critique to the archetype that the film and its theme song were updating: the paragon of manhood who is irresistible to women, but who in the end walks alone. Such an exemplar of American masculinity might work well in the noirish space of a black action film, but translated into the instances of everyday life, it rapidly comes close to the model of the sweet-talking player who inevitably abandons his wife and children. The song executes a remarkable balance between extreme bitterness and a clear-sightedness that almost verges on acceptance through its dramatic scenario of children who never really knew their father; gathered around their mother at his funeral, they ask her to deny the disapproval of the neighbors and receive nothing but the reply of the song’s chorus. And what is most extraordinary about the song is the way that the performers, guided by Norman Whitfield, are able to construct such an uncanny frame for the song’s bleak memorial. The extended introduction to the song presents an accretionary process much like the one heard in the “Theme from Shaft.” Undergirding the process is the obsessive bass riff, always defined against the equally obsessive tick of the hi-hat cymbal that recurs throughout the song.

      This bass riff is made enigmatic by a blurring of pitch from occurrence to occurrence. It is often unclear whether the lower boundary of the bass guitar’s musical space is Ab or because the pitch as heard is frequently in between and because the scale step in question is functionally the seventh degree; thus its ambiguation tends to evacuate the dominant as a productive harmony. The song rides atop a continuous and desolate Bb minor triad. Nevertheless, within this space the bass riff supports a variety of musical figures, including the manic jazzy trumpet with its echo effects, the violent pulse of the guitar’s wah-wah pedal, the uncanny violin clusters that almost evoke the sound of the shō in gagaku, and the alternately drooping and muttering violin tunes that sporadically emerge from the mix. As the introduction wends its way toward the body of the song, these figures, though relatively undefined in emotional content, acquire tremendous weight through a gradual increase in textural density and dynamics. When they suddenly vanish, the effect is like that of a sudden lapse away from feeling into a pure anticipation of dread. Papa’s children are waiting for an answer that they already know will give no one any joy.

      Equally crucial to the dark effect of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” is the ambiguous location of the beat; the music seems to move below the level of a primary

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