Melvin Peebles - Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Original Soundtrack)

Vinyl LP pressing. The wildly eclectic, hard-grooving, soulful soundtrack to the genre-defining film by the same name: Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Badassssss Song (1971). Featuring a then virtually unknown, but already hot Earth Wind & Fire, Sweetback's is a landmark record in what would become the blaxploitation genre. An absolute must have for connoisseurs of funk, soul, soul-jazz, hip-hop and beyond. Fans of Isaac Hayes' iconic Shaft album will not want to pass this by. Van Peebles did not have any money for traditional advertising methods, so he released the soundtrack album prior to the film's release in order to generate publicity. Initially, the film was screened only in two theaters in the United States. It went on to gross $4.1 million at the box office. Huey P. Newton celebrated and welcomed the film's revolutionary implications, and Sweetback became required viewing for members of the Black Panther Party. According to Variety, it demonstrated to Hollywood that films which portrayed "militant" blacks could be highly profitable, leading to the creation of the blaxploitation genre, although critic Roger Ebert did not consider this example of Van Peebles' work to be an exploitation film.