#29, "(Don't Worry) If There's Hell Below, We're All Gonna Go," Curtis Mayfield (1970)

150 Favorite Songs: #29, "(Don't Worry) If There's Hell Below, We're All Gonna Go," Curtis Mayfield (1970)

I used to like to pretend that I knew a ton about soul music, and jazz, and stuff like that. Like when I was nineteen years old, I really tried hard to pretend that even though my formative years were spent listening to The Cure and Joy Division and the Afghan Whigs, I had also somehow found time to secretly become an expert on Curtis Mayfield and Mahalia Jackson and Sonny Rollins and Cannonball Adderley, somehow. It was definitely posturing of the sort that young white guys who are ashamed of being young white guys engage—I honestly don't know how or when I would have accumulated a comprehensive knowledge of Tower Of Power's back catalog and influence given the amount of time I spent staring into the mirror and practicing how to intone "One hundred yeeeeeears," while wearing a cape made of a clothespin and a bath towel, pretending that I was Robert Smith.

What I mean to say is, mostly I learned about 70's music that wasn't made by sad/angry white fellas by tracing songs the Afghan Whigs covered—which isn't a shameful thing at all, unless you're trying to cover it up to seem more worldly—and the Whigs did a blazing version of "(Don't Worry) If There's Hell Below, We're All Gonna Go," which is how I discovered Curtis Mayfield, a gift from those guys for which I remain very grateful, as it gave me not just this song but also a background that’s proved useful in appreciating so much other music, since Mayfield’s music is absolutely foundational for hip hop, soul, and rock music.

But also: “(Don’t Worry) If There’s Hell Below, We’re All Gonna Go” is on its own a perfect song. It’s timeless in ways that are extremely unlikely, given the amount of era-appropriate slang that Curtis uses, and the specific references to Richard Nixon, and all of that. But the themes to it are so universal that I understand, looking back, why I wanted to claim deep understanding and expertise of it when I was nineteen years old—because it's  just an epic outpouring of paranoia and and tension and rage and hope and fear and bitterness and sarcasm, all over one of the best bass lines anybody anywhere ever wrote. "Everything is fucked, let's dance" is an eloquence that I wanted to feel some ownership of, even if I hadn't earned it. 

Of course, "(Don't Worry) If There's Hell Below, We're All Gonna Go" is more than just "everything is fucked, let's dance," even with that bass line and those horns—those horns!—working their magic. The thing that I love about it is the way that Curtis Mayfield seems to just fly above the music somehow, with all of this glorious noise (I'm not someone who gushes about production, but there's just so much happening on this song that you can trip out just on the battle for dominance between the horns and the strings) swirling around him. There's something apocalyptic about the song, even aside from the title and the opening narration about the Book of Revelations. It’s in the low rumble of that fuzzy bass that runs through the song, and the sparseness of the conga drums. It’s in Curtis Mayfield’s shriek at the end of the introduction—hell yeah, it’s in that shriek—and it’s in the way he addresses the various groups who’ve gathered before him to listen to the song, the staccato, patient rhythm of his delivery. It’s in the lyrics, the swell of the they say don’t worry, don’t worry and you can believe that he’s talking about spirits or ghosts or something living in the ether, whispering the tempting fantasy that you could simply choose not to worry, and Curtis Mayfield has brought a horn section and a string section and the most fuzzed-out bass you’ve ever heard to make sure that you know not to listen to them, because they don’t know there can be no show and if there’s hell below, we’re all gonna go, a warning that’s not quite final but also not at all hopeful, which certainly seemed to be the national mood in 1970 and has also been the mood for a solid decade now, probably longer.

And, good lord, it is just absolutely thrilling to hearing someone in complete mastery of something as big and unruly as all of that. There's so much happening musically, and so much happening thematically, and Curtis Mayfield seems effortless as he steers the ship. So sure: I will out my nineteen-year-old self as a poseur. I’m not ashamed. How can you listen to this song and not want to claim a tiny piece of it for yourself?