Shaft
The "Theme fromShaft" is now so ingrained in popular consciousness astheblaxploitation-movie track that it's hard to listen to it without a faint smirk. ("Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?"!!) But if you can get past the inadvertent humor, it's still a devilishly exciting piece of music--all hi-hat 16ths, wah-wah guitar, strings, and woodwind, like a Norman Whitfield Motown production taken to a baroque extreme. The rest of the album consists mainly of incidental mood music of no great worth: "Walk from Regio's," "Ellie's Love Theme"--you know the sort of thing. Only two other tracks feature the Black Moses pipes, while the endless "Do Your Thing" takes its place in the catalog of Hayes epics that began withHot Buttered Soul.--Barney Hoskyns