Anyone with a little bit of schoolin' in pop music and a pair of feet for dancing knows that Stax put out some funky, get-down shit in its time as a functioning record label. But Stax was always more than just horny horns and groovy grooves. Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in 1968, Stax positioned itself as America's premier exponent of black popular music. Sweet Sweetback, Wattstax, and Shaft were soon to follow, all three films releasing soundtracks on Stax. Equally cinematic and far, far more trippy, however, is this nasty funk nugget from 1973: a ghetto Oedipus Rex-sized epic for the black power movement. It's all about sorrow and anguish and the most distorted soul this side of "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)". Opening track "Brown-Baggin'" is slick and laid-back, but it's the ghetto symphony of "Poverty's Paradise" that's really guaranteed to freak yer brainz.
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