"Shaft (Music From the Soundtrack)" by Isaac Hayes | Album Review
The record that proved to the world that Isaac Hayes was a bad mother (shut your mouth).
This album review …
Genre: Funk, Soul, Orchestral
Label: Enterprise
Release Date: July 1, 1971
Vibe: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform
You’re hovering over an early-70s New York City panorama. It’s winter. People hustle down the sidewalk, hands in their pockets, bracing themselves against the cold. The camera slowly pans down, past cinema marquees and garbage-covered sidewalks, and then you hear it. The snap of the hi-hat. The funky tickle of the guitar riff. The title zooms in: Shaft. Then, as quickly as it appears on-screen, it disappears, but not before you see him. The eponymous private investigator, played by the late great Richard Roundtree, is clad in a beige turtleneck and brown leather overcoat. At the track’s rhythm builds, the camera tracks Shaft as he crosses a busy Manhattan intersection against the flow of traffic, flipping off a driver who almost hits him in the process. The rest of the iconic opening title sequence continues in much the same fashion, with Shaft traveling on foot through New York streets, almost entirely without any diegetic sound. All you hear (and all you’ll remember after you see it) is that famous Isaac Hayes theme.
When many casual music fans think about how blockbuster film soundtracks revolutionized the industry, they often fast-forward a few years too many. They’re quick to recall smash hits like the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Purple Rain, or any number of mega-successes from the 80s and 90s. But Shaft and, to one degree or another, many of its Blaxploitation movement brethren were the records that fundamentally reshaped how movies were heard in the pop culture zeitgeist. Before this soundtrack’s release, you basically had two kinds of film music hits—Beatles tie-ins and movements from scores that made unexpected headway on the charts (see Ennio Morricone’s work on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). None of those successes came close to the rapturous response to Shaft, which would eventually top the Billboard album chart, give Isaac Hayes his only No. 1 on the Hot 100, and would subsequently win the R&B legend an Academy Award. After 1971, nothing was ever the same again in the worlds of R&B or movie soundtracks.
Despite being the savior of Stax Records at the tail end of the 60s, Isaac Hayes wasn’t the obvious choice to helm this kind of musical project. He didn’t fit the mold of a traditional film scorer. He hadn’t written consistently for large orchestral ensembles, and, to that point, didn’t have a foothold in the Hollywood machine. But what he did have was an intrinsic understanding of how to infuse R&B with compelling layers of narrative drama (see his masterful cover of “Walk On By” for an example of those sensibilities at work before Shaft). You can’t teach raw instincts like that. It doesn’t hurt that Hayes was already on director Gordon Parks’ radar after the singer lobbied hard to be cast in the title role. During production, Parks sent Hayes early footage of some scenes, which led to some test compositions being sent back to MGM, including the bones of what would become the title theme. The studio hired Hayes to score the entire movie based on those early submissions.
By all accounts, the recording sessions were loose but not to the point of meandering. Hayes worked with members of the Bar-Keys, the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, and other Stax studio vets to sketch out ideas that started with a distinct hook—horn lines here, string swells there. Engineer Henry Bush later recalled that Hayes was adamant on capturing a "live" feel with everyone involved, demanding they prioritize the groove over note-perfect precision. In many ways, that refusal to separate high and low culture, soulful funk rhythms from symphonic grandeur, gave this album a singular, transcendent power. Hayes also fought to let the music lead the action in many cases, not the other way around. It’s a power dynamic we take for granted now, especially in high-octane action set pieces, but too often, soundtracks were reduced to filler between dialogue scenes. Instead, he crafted sprawling movements that ended up becoming moody character studies in their own right. They slowly built tension through the addition or subtraction of elements from the mix, enabling you to feel out and define the characters before they spoke.
“Theme from Shaft” is a prime example of this dynamic in action. The opening hi-hat, laid down by Willie Hall, is a thesis unto itself, focusing on stretching audience anticipation. It starts almost whisper-quiet at first but grows more and more feverish with each passing phrase, before and after the serpentine wah-wah guitar from Charles Pitts slithers into the mix. The sumptuous strings and bright horn flourishes add layer upon layer of mystery and intrigue. At that point, you don’t know who this Shaft dude is, but you’re more than a little curious. Hayes’ vocals don’t appear until almost three minutes into the track’s runtime, and when they do, they’re the epitome of ultra-cool remove. He presents Shaft as more than just a sex symbol, too. He’s a man who sticks his neck out for the right people and won’t bolt when the going gets tough. A bad mother, indeed.
Although it’s the most famous composition from Shaft, the main theme is far from the only delight on this record. Other standouts include “Soulsville,” which functions almost like a Greek chorus from the early-70s New York ghettos. It’s a slow, mournful ballad about the realities of Black urban life that, like “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” wraps social commentary in a gospel-inspired arrangement. “Bumpy’s Lament” features muted guitar and a laid-back bassline that drips with both menace and melancholy, creating a supple instrumental that’s since been sampled again and again by greats like Dr. Dre and Erykah Badu. “Walk From Regio’s” is a masterclass in tension-building through brisk pacing and syncopation, so much so that you can hear echoes of Lalo Schifrin’s Dirty Harry soundtrack and Quincy Jones’ for The Getaway between the lines it draws. Finally, you have “Do Your Thing,” a nearly 20-minute-long funk jam that leaves you hanging on every note. Imagine being so locked in with your band that you could casually record a track that seems to defy space and time?
At its core, Blaxploitation films were, first and foremost, about reclaiming space for African Americans and their stories to be seen in a more positive light. It sounds like a modest ambition today, but in 1971, a film like Shaft had a profound impact on the film industry. Here was a movie, made on a modest budget of around $1 million, that would become one of only three profitable big-screen ventures for MGM that year, pulling in what Time called an “astonishing” $13 million. It was such a cash cow that it effectively helped save the studio from bankruptcy. It doesn’t hurt that the Hayes soundtrack became, as Amy Abugo Ongiri wrote for Criterion in 2022, “one of its defining features.” “Though earlier Hollywood films such as Hallelujah, Stormy Weather, and St. Louis Blues had featured African American music, Shaft cemented the marriage of Black film and Black music as foundational not only to the performances within a film but to every aspect of its aesthetic,” they continued. When Hayes eventually won the Oscar for Best Original Song for this film, he was only the third African American ever to receive the award and the first to do so in a non-acting category.
Coming off the civil rights era, Hayes’ score showed that Black style didn’t need to be softened or filtered to resonate with mainstream audiences. These songs aren’t watered-down funk or disco that the predominantly White masses would clamour for later that decade. Instead, it was gritty, sexy, and unapologetically true to its roots. The film cracked the mold wide open, allowing multiple generations of artists to speak louder and dream bigger. Hayes also pioneered a new business model that, to that point in history, had been largely untapped. After Shaft, studios and labels began taking soundtracks seriously as standalone cultural products rather than accompanying afterthoughts. They’d quickly become reliable hit-making machines, culminating most recently in chart-topping curation efforts for films like Black Panther and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. All of them owe a considerable debt to Hayes’ vision, which proved that music and film could rise together, both commercially and artistically, to create an ecosystem that reinforced the other’s success.
A lot of the records I’ve discussed in this newsletter can trace their DNA back to Shaft. I suppose that says something about my personal preferences to a degree, but the dominance of pop music is undeniable. From neo-soul and alternative R&B to hip-hop subgenres like G-funk and trap, Hayes’s cultural contributions make those endpoints feel inevitable in hindsight. His work on this soundtrack was the spark that would set the charts ablaze with categorically Black influence. His was a sonic declaration that power, style, and storytelling didn’t have to compromise to make their mark. They could strut, burn, and groove, all on their own terms. More than anything else, that commitment to one’s art is why I consider Hayes to be a genius.
What’s your favorite Isaac Hayes track? Shout it out in the comments.