Time Capsule: Curtis Mayfield, There’s No Place Like America Today

Every Saturday, Paste will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and assessing its current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at Curtis Mayfield’s deeply profound and splendidly subdued 1975 masterpiece, a bleak yet comforting dissection of post-Nixon America that dares to expound on what love and survival can exist under the thumb of a system rigged against you.

I’d gone without a gaming system of any kind since the early 2010s, when I had a PlayStation 3 that inevitably capsized beneath my growing teenage intrigues. I was far more interested in music and in dating and in all the things I believed high schoolers were supposed to be into. When my controller finally broke, I never got it replaced and instead retired the console altogether. I remember then, in 2013, the release of Grand Theft Auto V being something of a cultural phenomenon. Friends skipped school to play the game on release day; it was all I heard about for weeks. Even as the years passed and 2014 became 2015 and then graduation came in 2016, it was still ever-present in the pantheon of my generation’s zeitgeist. By the time I downloaded Fortnite onto my college-issued iPad in 2018, it felt like the gaming world had long passed me by.

So when, just three days after Ohio went into COVID-19 lockdown, my birthday came around and my parents thought it made sense to give me a PlayStation 4, a gift that would no doubt be a welcome distraction when there was nothing else good to do. The console had been out, by that time, for nearly seven years in the United States. Just as the gaming world had already left me behind, the PlayStation 4 would, come election time in November, become immediately outdated upon the release of the PlayStation 5. Nevertheless, I saw it fit to buy GTA V before anything else—I needed to catch up on the world I had remained in such close proximity to all those years ago.

I’ve become increasingly sentimental about everything over the last four years. I’m the type of person who, when a particularly vibey song comes on the radio in GTA V, I put all of my focus onto savoring that moment. When Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” engulfs the Los Santos Rock Radio station, I love to saunter around the hills and find a good parking lot to linger in. The same goes for Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga” and the Highwaymen’s “Highwayman.” Even when Naked Eyes’ “Promises, Promises” stumbles out of the tape-deck, I am hopelessly romantic about it. The game’s crime-fueled undercurrents and storylines fall away into a portal of faraway bliss.

But it was Frank Ocean’s in-game version of his Blonded Radio where it all went different. Cruising down the game’s version of the Pacific Coast Highway, a song called “So in Love” by Curtis Mayfield trickled through the speakers of my television. It was a crisp, cloudless coastal night and, in a flash, its volume got cranked up. Hundreds of hours of logged gameplay later and I still find myself pausing missions or rerouting the GPS when “So in Love” comes on, if only to let myself sit with Mayfield’s voice and those galloping horns. When the world had closed in on itself four years ago, it was a window into a kind of living I didn’t quite have access to. Now, even as the world has opened back up again and I, from time to time, log into GTA V and make pilgrimages across the San Andreas map, I let time slow down when “So in Love” comes on the radio. I let it all feel as real as it ever could.

Prior to GTA V, I of course knew as much about Curtis Mayfield as anyone might have. I was familiar with Curtis and Super Fly, two of his first three albums which also happen to be two of the greatest albums of the 1970s and two of the greatest albums period. Super Fly the movie, along with Car Wash, practically won Academy Awards in my house when I was growing up. I could recognize “Move On Up,” from Mayfield’s debut, with ease, as that opening horn ensemble is progressive and psychedelic. Mayfield existed in the same thought as Al Green, Isaac Hayes and Donny Hathaway had—Black singers who existed adjascently to Motown but were no doubt just as fundamental in shaping the foundations of contemporary funk and pop-soul. Mayfield had first gained attention a decade earlier as a member of the Impressions, a trio of singers who dabbled in everything from gospel to doo-wop by the time Curtis left in 1970 to pursue his solo career.

After Super Fly spent four weeks atop the pop albums chart in 1972 and spawned two hit singles (“Freddie’s Dead,” “Superfly”), Mayfield would make Back to the World, collaborate with Gladys Knight & the Pips on Claudine and then, within about 18 months of each other, release Sweet Exorcist and Got to Find a Way back-to-back and compose the soundtrack for Let’s Do It Again with the Staple Singers. By the time he got around to putting out There’s No Place Like America Today in May 1975, he’d put out seven LPs in less than five years. So often, when considering what the best run of albums by one artist in music history was, our minds rightfully go directly to Stevie Wonder’s streak from Music of My Mind through Hotter Than July. But, Mayfield’s discography from 1970 through 1975 was very, very good as well. Curtis, Super Fly and There’s No Place Like America Today would solidify that alone, but those other aforementioned albums are all close to top-drawer, too.

There’s No Place Like America Today is sorely underrated especially. It only peaked at #120 on the Billboard 200 and didn’t even crack the Top 10 on the R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart upon release. Mayfield’s career was never all that defined by accolades anyway. Before his death in 1999, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice (once as a member of the Impressions in 1991 and again as a solo artist in 1999) and nominated for eight Grammys, losing all of them. In 1994 he was given the Grammy Legend Award and then, a year later, was bestowed with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Just as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On was a product of its time and a stirring account of a racially divided, post-counterculture-era America on the precipice of the Vietnam War’s conclusion, Mayfield’s There’s No Place Like America Today sought to articulate the disparity between the American Dream and the common man’s washed-away reality. Considering that violent crime rates were increasing at a concerning clip, political scandals tinted Pennsylvania Avenue pitch-black and the automotive industry was flattened by surging oil prices by 1975, it’s no surprise that Mayfield, one of recorded music’s least-didactic storytellers, would come up for air with an album-long contradiction. There’s No Place Like America Today is bleak but comforting, a record that doesn’t scorn or question but, rather, chronicles—as Mayfield’s funk and soul textures remain warm even when they’re wrapped around solemn portraits of a country not in flux, but staggeringly routine, brutal and familiar.

On album opener “Billy Jack,” a man learns that an old friend was shot. Critics have inferred that the song’s protagonist is a convict who’s been given this message on his day of release. You can read “Billy Jack” in many ways—maybe it’s about a convict hearing that an old pal was killed, or maybe a longtime face moved back to town and heard the news—but what stands within every reading is Mayfield’s lyricism and his ability to weave doubt into dismay. “Somebody past noon shot across the room, and now the man no longer lives,” he sings. “Too bad about him, too sad about him. Don’t get me wrong, the man is gone, but it’s a wonder he lived this long.” Mayfield is blunt, too, using phrases like “sad bloody mess” and “one-sided duel, gun and a fool” to underscore the violence without sugar-coating it. A buddy is gone but his spirit lingers, as Lucky Scott’s liquid, wah-wah’ing bassline gets sticky and Rich Tufo’s arrangement of horns lingers brashly.

Church bells ring “When Seasons Change” into focus, as guitars, organs and bass coil around each other. It’s the kind of song that, if recorded by anyone else, would be a career-best. But, for Curtis Mayfield, it’s a masterpiece in a litter of many. Mayfield delivers a monologue that, even almost 50 years later, sounds like a State of the Union address. “A lot of scars that kind of scare you to remember, scufflin’ times in seeing people trying to put you down,” he sings. “For goodness sakes! People trying to take what you know you’ve found, stranded in someone else’s neighborhood, listening to the undertone.” His cadence comes at you like that of a preacher, but Mayfield has nothing to preach to his listeners. He admits that praying to Jesus makes him a little stronger and that, sure, he “might live the life a little bit longer.” But then he poses a question—“How can anyone survive when everybody’s been made a sacrifice?”—but it’s a rhetorical one. Blame, vulnerability, money and blessings circle the drain but no names come to collect. Mayfield’s poetics leave the door open for the rest of us to write a conclusion for.

And so we are flung into the cruising, woodwind and organ-heavy “So in Love,” a song that is as crushingly tranquil as it is sensually impressionistic. It’s the kind of music that could unzip the sky that swirls above you—the kind of music that is so electric and pleasant that surely no music ever came before it. “Life is strange,” Mayfield sings, straining his falsetto around the contours of the keyboards behind him, “believe me it is true. We don’t always mean the things we sometimes do. Look at me, look at you—you know we’re so in love.” The keys set the pace while the guitars glisten and that bassline from Scott throbs like the pulse you can feel beneath a cut on your finger. Mayfield, through double-tracked vocals, mentions religion but abstractly (“This love affair is bigger than we two, lose the faith and it will swallow you”), in the sense that there is something kinetic and unknowable in the way two souls can become bound to one another.

This crops up one song later, on “Jesus,” but in a way that forgoes any spiritual high-ground in favor of a very humanistic, sublime sense of curiosity. “Maybe the words I say is just another way to pray, I don’t know,” Mayfield admits, before concluding that “only you know how to be free” and “if you wanna grin, let it smile. Feel a little happy? Go on and dance a while.” The Almighty in Mayfield’s world is realer than the rest of us, but how we address him is between us and what we choose to confess while our heads are bowed. “The depth of night, the light for sight, sort of sets the moral standards of soul,” Mayfield contends. “Gives you strength to pay the price of life, and rewards you with a bit of fulfillment.” “Jesus” is pure gospel but tinted with Mayfield’s penchant for funk—albeit in a subdued sense here. The song flutters between spoken-word and soundtracked sermon; at the three-and-a-half-minute mark, it wraps itself in a guitar solo that colors Mayfield’s thesis, that he’d rather die than see his kin go hungry. “Something’s mighty, mighty wrong,” he admits, “and it seems awful strange.”

There’s No Place Like America Today is a unique entry in Mayfield’s career sonically, especially for how it is incredibly funk-oriented but deeply subtle. Not a second goes wasted when he and his coterie of players get cooking—the horns stretch phenomenally but never too far; Quinton Joseph and Henry Gibson provide percussion that becomes the record’s greatest equalizer, nurturing a buzzing aura with patient, accentuating snare hits; Harold Dessent’s woodwinds are abundant but rarely colossal, existing like nerve-endings that sews the tome of Mayfield’s plainspoken, matter-of-fact point-of-view into the chasm at which splendor and splendid converge.

“Blue Monday People” lingers on temptation and emptiness, as Mayfield considers how love and depression can co-exist in a world of neglect. “But when cupboards are bare, our love we can share” is the truth in the face of a system that needs Mayfield and his people, but is “trying to mislead us.” “Life breaking our hearts, I’m so tired, it’s a shame,” he sings. “This hustling affair ain’t the way I even care. We’ll be together in spite of the crimes of the night.” There’s No Place Like America Today is a political record that considers the politics of personhood. Mayfield looks at courage and survival in the wake of violence and abandonment and sees every way they can be considered—through love and faith. He gets transparent on “Blue Monday People,” admitting that, while he doesn’t know everyone’s problems, he’s gonna stick around regardless. “Need someone to see me through, need someone to comfort me,” he demands. “Sometimes, you can let me be. Just let me be.”

There’s No Place Like America Today is a conceptual part of Mayfield’s catalog. As the seven-song album progresses, his worry about survival becomes a call to arms for closeness to outlast every due that’s paid. “Hard Times” conjures a moment of cynicism, as he reckons with Black-on-Black crime and declares that, even though he’s filled with love, “I’m afraid they’ll hurt my pride.” As corruptness lingers, Mayfield drops a line: “There’s no love to be found.” It reverberates and then collapses, as “Love to the People” reconfigures the strangeness into assurance—that “there’s another way” and that a “little bit of brotherhood” can be “good for the soul,” despite unemployment lines filling up and TVs and radios handing out nothing but bad news. “I’m not giving up this little pride,” Mayfield argues. “I got a lifetime to keep a-livin’ mine. The way to do it is to get right to it.”

While the system might be working to strip Mayfield and his brothers, sisters, lovers, and neighbors of time and truth, he makes room for love and for sadness and for faith and for friendship and for hopelessness to co-exist. If it’s political to be alive with such immensity, Mayfield argues, then perhaps there is peace to be found so long as there are stories to be sung. Tufo’s strings and horns persist like they have a story of their own to tell, too, as the notes cushion the bareness in Mayfield’s high-heavens voice and the band’s organ warbles. Gary Thompson and Phil Upchurch’s guitars are silk-spun into blankets that warm the body that’s gone cold, and Scott’s basslines flash a grin around every corner. “You do so many things with a smiling face,” Mayfield sings to a lover 12 minutes in, before adopting that psalm himself. And that is the arc of There’s No Place Like America, that Curtis Mayfield is the architect of his own grace.