1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 335. Curtis Mayfield – There's No Place Like America Today (1975)

Regardless of the skin colour of the artist, you could guess that an album titled “There’s No Place Like America Today” from the mid-Seventies is going to be deeply sarcastic. The cover image makes the racial dichotomy clear – the bright and optimistic advertising poster of a nice white family driving their car through sunlit countryside while in front a queue of monochrome black people queue in line for ... meagre groceries? Social security? Job centre? The composition also makes the white family loom over the queue, and looks like they’re about to plough through them in their giant car. But this advertising hoarding itself is covering up grey towering tenements behind it (in which we can imagine people united in social deprivation regardless of their ethnic background).

I don’t normally comment much on album covers except when they’re iconic (and sometimes little more than “Roxy Music Country Life – phwoar!"), but I loved the layers of symbolism in this one.

Musically, Mayfield delivers some silky soul and funk that follows on, in many ways, from Super Fly. He deals with social commentary, as expected, in songs such as Billy Jack, about a young man killed in gun violence (“It can’t be no fun, to be shot by a handgun”. No, Curtis, it probably isn’t), or Hard Times, about black-on-black crime.

But he also includes more optimistic songs. So In Love is basically a soul love song, while the song Jesus deals in matter of faith, as you might expect. There is an underlying anger there, yes, at social injustice, but the album isn’t an overwhelmingly negative experience.

This time around, there’s very little information on the album on my usual favourite source of lazy and perfunctory research, Wikipedia. Chart performance is middling, there’s nothing to suggest that this was a breakthrough or hit for Mayfield, nor is it particularly a change in direction compared to Super Fly, so I can only guess that it’s inclusion is like many of the CSNY-family albums; the editors liked it.

As did I, but I think the reason that I went on for longer about the cover art this time is that I have less to say about the music.