With its slinky, sinuous groove and rattling percussion, Pusherman offers a fly-on-the-wall trip through the inner-city ghetto, guided by Curtis Mayfield’s inimitable falsetto.

There’s a complicated moral ambiguity about its subject in the lyrics. On the one hand The Pusherman is a predator who preys on people in his own backyard in search of wealth and status: “Ain’t I clean, bad machine, super cool, super mean.”

He’s also a product of that same poverty, and a vital cog in the black economy’s service industry, offering a balm to the harsh reality outside: “A man of odd circumstance, a victim of ghetto demands.”

Curtis Mayfield later explained: “The first thing I wanted to do was not condone what was going down but understand it and speak in terms of how one can keep from getting locked into these things, which youngsters and a lot of people see all around them.”

Pusherman was first released on the soundtrack of the 1972 Blaxploitation film Super Fly – Mayfield wrote and produced all the songs on the soundtrack and it went on to become one of the few movie soundtracks to outgross the film itself. It was also one of the first to use the N-word in its lyrics: “I’m your mama, I’m your daddy, I’m that nigga in the alley”.

It was recorded in New York, where Mayfield and his band (The Curtis Mayfield Experience) filmed their cameo role in Super Fly, performing this song on a nightclub stage.

The rest of the soundtrack album – a classic – was recorded in the tiny demo studio of the old RCA studio building in Chicago that Mayfield bought when he set up his own record label Curtom (with his manager Eddie Thomas) in 1968.