Qobuz pronunciation7/5/2023 ![]() ![]() He’ll tell you he knows he’s livin’ right The song presents a multi-verse character study of a Music Man-like con man who refuses to ever admit he’s wrong, even when presented with evidence. Wonder also speaks to the times on this pretty ballad which, despite the free-flowing “flute” sounds (actually the TONTO), is apparently a Watergate-era condemnation of disgraced President Richard Nixon: “He’s the man with a plan/ Got a counterfeit dollar in his hand/ He’s Misstra Know-It-All.” That’s him on the piano, the drums, the Moog bass, the TONTO, the high and low harmonies, hell, even doing the handclaps-and, inevitably, influencing one Prince Rogers Nelson. But it’s all, save for the voices noted above, Wonder. A thick slice of funk, soul and blues, it sounds like it’s created by an entire band and a whole group of background singers. “I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow/ And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow/ This place is cruel, nowhere could be much colder/ If we don’t change, the world will soon be over/ Living just enough, stop giving just enough for the city,” Wonder ends it. ![]() It’s a gut punch and, four decades before the Black Lives Matter movement, a wake-up call attempt to show the world the brutality of being Black in America. Having once been excitedly “living for the city,” the man is now “living just enough for the city.” “His hair is long, his feet are hard and gritty/ He spends the life walking the streets of New York City/ He’s almost dead from breathing in air pollution”-notice the echo of Gaye there-he sings. It’s said that a Record Plant janitor is behind the famous line ordering the main character to “get in that cell”-a line that would later be sampled by Public Enemy on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.”Īt this point in the song, Wonder’s own voice undergoes a jarring transformation, from his sweet and smooth signature to the growl of a grizzled bluesman, as he spells out the bad news: Stevie’s own lawyer, Jonathan Vigoda, voices the judge who sends him away. Wonder’s brother Calvin Hardaway plays the part of the framed young man, while tour director Ira Tucker Jr. It’s high-tension, complete with samples of teeming streets, sirens, the slam of a cell door. In the middle, the song turns into a one-act play: You hear the bus bound for NYC pull up and carry him away … to a life of accidental crime and a 10-year prison sentence. (It should be noted that TONTO-The Original New Timbral Orchestra-developers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff were on hand for programming the instrument and co-producing the album with Wonder.) The Fender Rhodes electric piano starts off moody, panning in a head-spinning way to induce disorientation, then the TONTO synthesizer comes in so brassy and bright-a sign of hope. a dollar”-and seeing his own stagnant future (“To find a job is like a haystack needle/ ‘Cause where he lives they don’t use colored people”)-he is determined to join the Second Great Migration and find a new life in New York City. After watching his mother scrub other people’s floors and his father work 14-hour days for “barely. ![]() You can hear Gaye’s influence on the now-classic “Living for the City,” a seven-minute-plus song about a Black boy born poor and destined to face discrimination in Mississippi. Here is how the five most important tracks on Innervisions came to be-and why they still matter today. The eye-opening messages of the title track-an emotional condemnation of police brutality-and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” one of the first mainstream hits that expressed heartache over our environment, stirred something deep in Wonder. And one of its biggest acts, Marvin Gaye, took a sharp left turn from the label’s hit-making candy-coated R&B and soul in 1971 with his groundbreaking What’s Going On. After the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, Motown moved to Los Angeles. It also came at a time of change for Motown, the label that gave Wonder his professional start when it signed him at 11 years old. ![]() And “Little” Stevie Wonder, at age 23, released Innervisions, his 16th album-one that would capture the restlessness of the times and have an incredible influence on music moving forward. launched its first space station, but it was also in an oil crisis. Wade overturned state bans on abortion, leading to a new era for women. The ongoing Watergate scandal was consuming the Nixon administration, and political corruption led to the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew. The Vietnam War was finally winding down. Nineteen seventy-three was a year of great change in the United States. ![]()
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