Earth, Wind & Fire became Blaxploitation legends playing Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

The band broke out of obscurity with the funky, avant-garde soundtrack to Melvin Van Peebles' groundbreaking Black grindhouse film.

By Craig D. Lindsey | September 18, 2025 | 1:00pm

Photo: Cinemation Industries

Film Features Sounds Of Blaxploitation

Earth, Wind & Fire became Blaxploitation legends playing Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

In the year-long series Sounds Of Blaxploitation, Craig D. Lindsey plays the hits that defined a genre, drawing connections between the music of the moment and the films that gave it a platform.

Since it’s September, let’s take it back a ways to when Chicago soul icons/future Sabrina Carpenter collaborators Earth, Wind & Fire provided the music for the movie that set off the Blaxploitation genre. I often have to remind myself that the space suit-wearing funksters were a little-known band that writer-director Melvin Van Peebles called on to lay down some tracks for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, his 1971 Black-and-proud grindhouse art flick.

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Their peak era of “September,” “Shining Star,” “Boogie Wonderland,” and other disco hits were years ahead of them. In 1971, Earth, Wind & Fire were just session musicians collaborating on a score with Van Peebles on the fly. The story goes that Van Peebles’ ex-secretary’s boyfriend (“a together brother,” Van Peebles called the man in the Sweetback making-of book) hipped him to the band, fresh from releasing their self-titled debut. Founding frontman-drummer Maurice White was won over by Van Peebles and his mission to make a movie starring, as it’s memorably listed in Sweetback’s credits, the Black community. “Melvin taught me about getting shit done,” White wrote in his 2018 autobiography My Life With Earth, Wind & Fire, “even though the $500 check he wrote is still bouncing!”

With Van Peebles’ head swirling with melodies and groove ideas, he and the band recorded the score on a Paramount Studios soundstage. As key scenes were shown on a giant screen, they basically had a two-day jam session. There was no time for second takes and overdubs—if flubs were made, they kept it pushing. The incidental pieces have the feel of jazz vets coming up with messy but still funky riffs during a boozy get-together. (Before Earth, Wind & Fire, White was a longtime drummer for The Ramsey Lewis Trio.)

“Sweetback’s Theme,” the movie’s most oft-used selection, mainly serves as traveling music for the lead protagonist, the quiet (and quite gifted) sex-worker-turned-fugitive cop killer Sweetback (played by Van Peebles). As he runs all over Los Angeles, dodging corrupt cops, racist whites and other variations of The Man, we get a loungy, uptempo, electric piano-led jazz loop that’s enhanced with bluesy horns.

The resulting soundtrack album was Van Peebles’ attempt to get the word out on his picture—inadvertently ensuring that future Blaxploitation movies would follow suit—by giving both consumers and radio stations a Black-made LP companion, released on the legendary Southern soul label Stax Records. But the soundtrack is just as much of an avant-garde pileup as the movie. It’s often overlooked how this defiant, down-and-dirty vision of ’70s Black America—something rarely seen on movie screens at the time—is also weird as fuck. A transgressive, psychedelic mashup of jump cuts, extreme zooms, random close-ups, odd visual effects, and other experimental film trickery, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song often makes you feel like you’re watching the hallucinations of a militant soul brotha on his first acid trip.

The soundtrack inhabits the same freewheeling, boldly what-the-fuck spirit. Subtitled “An Opera!” on its back cover, the 41-minute soundtrack is a genre-bouncing cacophony of dialogue snippets, inner-city effects, and other sounds of Blackness. The first track, “Sweetback Loses His Cherry,” is basically a recording of the opening credit sequence, where a working gal gets her back blown out by way-too-young Sweetback (played by Van Peebles’ son, Mario, who would go on to become a filmmaker in his own right with movies like New Jack City).

After a gospel choir joyfully sings “This Little Light of Mine” as the lady reaches full climax, Earth, Wind & Fire ushers in the credits with a funked-up, shagadelic riff. That riff serves as the backbeat for “Hoppin John,” one of two songs that play during a first-act scene where a living room full of people watches an elaborate sex show featuring Sweetback, two women, and a sparkler-carrying drag performer who goes by “the good dyke fairy godmother.”

But there are also radio-friendly tracks that show up blaring out of radios in the first half, like when “Sanra Z” plays during a scene where Sweetback hides out at a gambler-heavy backroom. (A DJ announces that the track is playing on KGFJ Soul Radio, a long-gone, L.A. AM station that had an all-Black format.)

The most Greek-chorusy tracks appear in the second half, as a desperate Sweetback starts his on-foot trek across the desert, en route to the border. It’s here where Van Peebles taps into his speak-singing Brer Soul persona on the soundtrack. Named after Van Peebles’ 1968 experimental spoken-word debut album, Soul serves as Sweetback’s inner monologue, pushing him to never give up. “Come On Feet” is literally all militant motivation from Van Peebles: “Come on feet, do your thang / We all know Whitey’s game.”

In a scene where Sweetback urinates on dirt to create a paste that’ll heal a bullet wound, Van Peebles has a back-and-forth with a disapproving chorus (Van Peebles: “I wanna get off these knees!” Chorus: “You talking revolution, Sweetback!”) On the commentary track for the Criterion Collection Sweetback Blu-ray (part of the Melvin Van Peebles Essential Films box set that dropped in 2021), Van Peebles explains that this is a near-death Sweetback subconsciously talking to angels, eventually convincing them why he should keep on moving. “Haul your Black ass, Sweetback!” the angels later tell him. By the way, the name of this particular track is “Sweetback Getting It Uptight And Preaching It So Hard The Bourgeois Reggin Angels In Heaven Turn Around.”

Thanks to Van Peebles pulling every renegade stunt under the sun in order to get this movie made (the dude actually filed for workman’s comp when he contracted gonorrhea from one of the myriad sex scenes), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song became a word-of-mouth hit. It also set off the Blaxploitation era, a decade of films about Black folk, starring Black folk, featuring music from Black folk (but predominantly, after Van Peebles did it all, written and directed by white folk).

Earth, Wind & Fire didn’t appear on any more Blaxploitation soundtracks after Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which reached number 13 on the Billboard Top R&B Albums chart. They only did one more soundtrack in the ’70s: That’s The Way Of The World, named after the 1975 music-biz satire where they also star as themselves. But they’ll always have a soft spot in the hearts of Blaxploitation heads, for providing outta-sight musical accompaniment in a film that was rated X by, as Van Peebles notoriously put it, an “all-white jury.”

Next time: In honor of Halloween, we’ll break down the music from a Blaxploitation horror flick, featuring one of the baddest bloodsuckers of all time.