10 Radio-Friendly Songs About Drugs

6. Pusherman - Curtis Mayfield

Curtis Mayfield might just be one of the coolest men to have ever picked up a microphone. The soul man was an absolute hit machine back in the 1970s, and his influence can still be heard through the work of artists like Anderson .Paak, Thundercat, and the late Mac Miller.

Perhaps just as significantly though, Mayfield was at the forefront of a new generation of black musicians who were keen to incorporate messages of social awareness into their music. On Pusherman, he openly sings of an inner city drug dealer, offering his wares to the surrounding neighbourhood like a black market “doctor”, skulking in back allies and wielding power like a “prince”.

But what was revolutionary about Mayfield’s writing was that he realised that the eponymous Pusherman was to be pitied too. The artist, who himself grew up on the north side of Chicago, describes his title character as “a man of odd circumstance, a victim of ghetto demands”. It was a perceptive and sympathetic viewpoint, but most importantly, it begged for a conversation to be started on the issue.