The Wonder of Stevie - 6 - Confetti Cannon | 1979 - infinity

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Isn’t the streak over now? Depends on who you ask. After Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder returns with…a left turn. A departure album. Something totally different than his usual sound. Does that end the streak or complicate it? And when the streak is all said and done, does Stevie Wonder get the credit he truly deserves for his genius?Featuring Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Questlove, Janelle Monae, Mereba and more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

So here we are, out of albums. We discussed Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Inner Visions, Fulfilling Us' first finale, Songs in the Key of Life. That's the whole streak. 1972 to 1976. So what are we still doing here? Why am I still talking? Aren't we done?

We're done, right? I would say no, because there are people out there who are begging to differ. I am begging to differ. Even though conventional wisdom decrees that Stevie Wonder's classic period runs from music of my mind to songs in the key of life, your host, me, is a huge dissenter. There are two more albums. One was a movie soundtrack. The other was a delicious pop album from 1980 called Hotter Than July. But to make that case, I gotta make the case for the weird album. The outlier. The left turn. The bomb. The turkey. The one that gets invited to the prom, then doused with pig's blood, the stepchild, the one that's misunderstood. I talked to President Obama about this.

The plants thing, I never, you know, I just couldn't fully get there. Stick around. I'm going to make the case. I know you will. I'm going to make the case. I know you will. The Plants Thing, as the president put it, is Stevie Wonder's journey through the secret life of plants. It's the first album Stevie releases after Songs in the Key of Life,

three years after, in 1979. It's also the soundtrack of a documentary called The Secret Life of Plants. Didn't stay in theaters long enough for most people to see it. It's a long movie biz story that's not worth going into now, but the movie itself has its beauty. It uses time-lapse photography to dramatize what dynamic, enduring organisms plants are.

How complex and interconnected and in sync with the universe they are. There's a lot of blooming and unfurling and swaying, mushrooming. Anyway, when the finished soundtrack came out, people were confused, dismissive. I talked to Robert Criscow, the writer who folks call the dean of rock criticism. He created the music section of The Village Voice in 1969. Color him unimpressed by Stevie's plants. As far as I'm concerned, the streak doesn't end until 1980, in hotter than July. Which means that you like the secret life of plants? Yes, sir!

We don't even have to talk about it, but we can. Well, I will tell you that I did a lot of re-listening, and I said to myself, no. When I talked to the keyboardist Greg Fillinganes, a legend who played in Stevie Wonder's band Wonder Love and on Songs in the Key of Life, he's not surprised by the cold shoulder Stevie's Plants album got. Man, people ain't trying to see a movie about some plants. Come on, man.

That's really, really, come on. Really? You don't need that explained to you. Come on. Are you going to line up to sit in a movie theater and watch a thing about some flowers? Seriously? Am I going to line up to watch a movie about some flowers?

Is that the challenge, Greg Filling Gaines? Because if it is, challenge accepted, dude. Because it so happens that every year on April 20th, 420, the Alamo Drafthouse plays The Secret Life of Plants. So I walked to my local Alamo in downtown Brooklyn, and that's exactly what I did. I'm about to go see Journey through the Secret Life of Plants.

I've never seen it before. It's a dream to be able to stand here tonight, punch my ticket, and go watch some plants. Be Stevie'd. Oh, hey there. Give a second. I'm Wesley Morris, and I'm working on a podcast about the music in this movie.

And I'm just really curious about what made you want to come see Journey to the Secret Life of Plants? Uh, Stevie Wonder did the soundtrack, and that was pretty much all that I needed to know. I did look it up, and all the Google search results were pretty obscure, so I'm very excited to venture into the unknown. I've been a fan of the record. I've been listening to that vinyl for a long time. Are you high right now? Yes.

Maybe a little. All right, this is exciting. I'm excited for you guys, because y'all don't even know. I know, I'm not. Stevie and a Field of sunflowers. Oh, my God. This is beautiful. Oh, Stevie.

He just walked through the plants. How was it for you? It paid off. It was amazing. I'm not sure I really got it necessarily. Do you think this movie would work were it not for Stevie Wonder's music? I think it would work on a completely different level. It wouldn't work on this.

Just any time Stevie Wonder was singing, it was so beautiful. I was most familiar with the Sarita song at the end. He didn't have the right to go that hard for this film. Everything around this album had been mythic. Like finally seeing the show when you've listened to the soundtrack for 20 years. The movie is kooky and weird and in some parts kind of bad, but it's also moving. It's vulnerable and innocent. There's a purity about it. And whether you see the movie high or never see it at all, that innocence and wonder are in the music anyway. It's weird and experimental and luscious and doesn't sound like anything else.

Which is part of why I'm arguing that the streak keeps going. I think it's been misunderstood almost as much as I think Stevie Wonder's legacy has been misjudged. We'll get to that. But first, I'm Wesley Morris. I'm a critic at the New York Times. And this, for the final time, is the wonder of Stevie. Okay, before we go any further into these last two albums, it's probably useful to get back to where we are in the streak, just after Songs in the Key of Life. In 1977, Stevie wins Album of the Year for the

third time, but he's not at the ceremony. He's on tour in Lagos, Nigeria. During the broadcast, the producers try to patch him in, but the satellite connection is terrible. I remember asking him, why did you go to Africa when the Grammys happened? Like, in my life, I planned for the Grammys, like, back in October. This is Questlove, host of the Questlove Supreme podcast by iHeart, and he was home watching Baffled. Like, you released this album on the fourth quarter of 1976, on the same day that Earth, Wind & Fire released Spirit,

and you're the biggest star in the world. Like, somebody had to be upset that you weren't going to be there for this victory lap. And he just explained to me, like, you know, I wanted to be with my people. Stevie took home four Grammys that night, even though he wasn't there to accept them. And then he took a break. In 1977, the year after Songs in the Key of Life came out, he and his partner at the time, Yolanda Simmons, had their second child, Keita Morris, younger brother to Stevie's first daughter, Aisha. Stevie was happy being at home, spending time with his family, but then he got an offer he could not refuse, to come up with music

for The Secret Life of Plants. And Stevie uses the offer to take what can only be described as a departure, a very hard left. Here's the thing. If you're an artist, I believe there's a period that usually happens with your first three records in which you are in the game of creativity. Right. yeah. You're in full creative mode. Hopefully with one of those three shots, you'll reach some level of success. And the thing with success is that once you get a taste of success,

no matter how much you try to ignore it and say, no matter what, I'm sticking on my creative path. And there's some artists that are very much aware that they've jumped into a lake that might not be easy to get out of. And departure albums usually occur after the biggest album of your career. You best believe in the fall of 1979, where the world is salivating, like we are waiting for the Stevie Wonder record. And he released the perfect first single from it.

Granted, it was a ballad. Like, ballads didn't mean much to nine-year-old me. Send One Your Love is what you're talking about. Send One, yeah, Send One Your Love. Send One Your Love came out in November 1979. Nobody had really seen this movie. It was never widely released, so nobody really could. And nobody knew what the album was all about either. They just got this drop of this one beautiful ballad. A hint.

It set expectations so high for what was awaiting us. And then we hear it's a double album as well. Yo! When we went to the record store and I grabbed it and I looked at the cover, I was like, okay, this is a weird shade of green. It didn't look like the donuts on the last album cover. Yeah, this is allegedly the weird one. And I think there was a red line generationally. Questlove told me this is the album that put his dad off new albums altogether. Dad was like, hmm, okay. And so we brought it home

and I'll never forget. And I never heard him express any snark or cynicism towards anything. This is the day that my dad retired from music, like collecting music. This is a guy who built a 3,000 plus record collection in that household that has essentially educated me and put me in the position I'm in today. that has essentially educated me and put me in the position I'm in today. By side two, he was just like, nah, man, this is a ripoff. So what was people's problem? Well, for one thing, it wasn't like the other hit soundtracks

for like John Travolta mega hits like Saturday Night Fever or Grease. It wasn't even like the one for Sparkle or The Wiz. It was way more out there, more out there than a black Motown Wizard of Oz with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. It was mostly instrumental and, true to the movie's theme, entirely plant-based. Songs from their point of view. Which raises the practical matter of how a blind person writes music for a film. In Stevie's case, a producer on the project described each image to him while an engineer counted off the number of film frames so his timing was perfect.

So maybe he lost the songs in the Kia Life crowd, but he blew their kids' minds. The hard left kids, at least. This is the first time I'm witnessing disdain from an adult. But for me, I'm like, this is the most important album ever. That album taught me to dream. That album taught me to fantasize. That album taught me how to vision a future. And there's really no words on it, but just somehow I see it. Folks like Questlove, of course. Then there's really no words on it, but just somehow I see it. Folks like Questlove, of course.

Then there's Solange Knowles, who's often cited Secret Life of Plants as the main inspiration for her album When I Get Home. But also people like Janelle Monae, the musician, actor, free-ass motherfucker. Those are their words, and I support that. And lover of Journey

through the Secret Life of Plants. and I support that, and lover of Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. I feel like someone played it for me in Kansas City, and I was used to all of, obviously, like the hit songs, you know, Sir Duke and Fingertips. And so when I listened to this, I was just like, this is not Stevie Wonder. Like, as I know Stevie Wonder. The opening song on Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants sparked a lot of inspiration for me. And it just like, I could literally feel weeds clearing out of my mind.

Wow. Like, I could feel wherever my hair was supposed to grow, like I would just imagine that there was plant life coming up out of that. That opening track that Chanel is referring to, it's called Earth's Creation. And the opening synths sound primordial. Like some ooze that gushed from the ocean onto the shore, grew legs, and

proceeded to stand up. There are these huge cymbals that crash and clang with the bigness of the bang that made the universe. I heard a story that when you were 12 years old, that you basically tried to make a musical based on this album. Is that true? I did. I think I was in more high school. Okay.

Yeah, because it was like open music, you know? Uh-huh, uh-huh. on to this concept is because I had written a short story around photosynthesis and around aliens and aliens coming to abduct everyone that lived on my grandmother's street. And then they left me for some odd reason. Yeah, but they were communicating through the plants. And so that's how I got drawn into Secret Life of Plants. And it made me see myself differently and what we could do, you know. Stevie and I have the same skin color. When I think about Black music, when I think about, you know, me wanting to be an artist, it's like, wow, we can do this too. We can be this.

We can explore the sound of plants. We can listen to the colors in between. We can listen to the sounds that nobody hears but us and push it out, you know, and fully realize an idea. And I think that was like really big for me as I started to form who I wanted to be and how I wanted to identify as an artist. So basically he gave you a sense of not only musical diversity, but what the strength of a person's catalog could be. Yeah, where we could go. This is Stevie's MO, right? All he's ever really known as an artist is how to be true to himself.

I mean, he's still free, but now freedom is a kind of deep spiritual empathy that expresses its humanity through the day-to-day needs of the Venus flytraps of this world and the gorgeousness of a black orchid. For him, this left-turn album, this departure album, is the path of a free spirit. Freedom is not free. You have to fight for it. You have to fight for the time to execute a vision when nobody understands it. You have to fight sometimes internal battles to just go against the grain and go against what everybody loves you for and say, no, I'm going to honor my present, not my past.

I'm not even going to be in the future. I'm going to honor right now what is on my spirit and my heart. I think what they missed was Stevie being a free-ass motherfucker. That probably explains why people were so quick to dismiss this album. Plus, there were other new sounds. Some of the big albums of 1979 include the Bee Gees' Spirits Having Flown, Donna Summer's Bad Girls,

perfect album, the Eagles' The Long Run, the Knacks album with My Sharona on it, and Michael Jackson's Off the Wall. Albums by artists on fire. But I just want to be clear, Stevie was still on fire too. Oh yes, race babbling. This is the track that ends side two of disc one.

I posed this question on Twitter. Here's Questlove again. I wanted to know from people, I was like, was Race Babbling really the precursor to house music? Yes. Like the energy, and when I spin it now, especially at venues that want house energy, I spin that record, and it works like gangbusters.

And when Race Babbling came on, it felt like futuristic space music. To me, it was like Afrofuturist, energetic. I don't know. It's not Studio 54. It's Spaceship. Yeah, I'm thinking the future in space. This is the end of the disco era that folks like Donna Summer helped invent and perfect.

But here's Stevie, pushing past disco into the outer limits of what Funk promised. Every album in a streak is a statement. There are lots of people who think Stevie's streak starts with where I'm coming from in 1971. That was the beginning of a statement. And there are people like me who think the streak has to include the change-up. Because those albums are statements too. Where does this album might have been?

Stevie got a chance to try out some new tricks. And those tricks changed the path that music was headed down forever. If you don't believe me, ask King Britt. Writer, producer, composer, and professor of computer music at UC San Diego. Secret Life of Plants, man, like that was the first time that anyone ever used a sampler on an album. So the first sampler was called the Computer Music Melodian, and it was invented in Philly at University of Penn. But it was super archaic. Like, it's not like how the samplers are now.

But for its time, there was nothing like it. So it was like a hybrid of analog synth and what we call a sampler now, you know. So it had like a synth, it had an amp, and it had a tape deck. But you could record any sound into the deck and then play it using another keyboard. And so they used that on the whole album. And the song in particular, called The First Garden, where you hear these birds, like he sampled birds and he's playing the birds. Like it's, you know, like, this is Stevie, like, 79. Like, yo.

I'm going to interrupt King Brit here and say that we're not talking about using a pre-existing song as the basis for something new, like on Rappers Delight, whose foundation is Chic's Good Times, which came out the same year as Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. What King Brit's talking about is taking a song or sound and electronically altering it with a machine so you can play it like an instrument.

Also, what he's saying Stevie's doing here, it's really innovative. It's also really arduous. You need all of this equipment to capture the bird, and then you have to transfer the bird recording into the sampler and hope it was usable. Like, now a sampler's just in your computer. He's playing birds, but the way he did it, it's just so ill.

Like, the whole album is just ill, but wow. ill. Like, the whole album is just ill, but wow. This is the kind of reaction to this album that I'm far more used to. What Janelle Monet and Questlove and Kingbird are talking about. Maybe it helps to have been a kid or an adolescent who didn't have any preconception of Stevie and were just naive enough to be open to the sophistication of an achievement like this. He was so evidently proud of this thing, too.

He toured in support of it. Secret Life of Plant sounds futuristic. And it is. It's another technological breakthrough for Stevie. But Stevie's breaking new ground isn't new. He's always been electronic music's greatest champion. Looking at Stevie Wonder's electronic music lineage, there are many lines that you can draw back to Stevie. Here's King Brit again. First and foremost, Motown was Detroit, Stevie's Detroit, and Stevie opened the door for

all Black musicians to embrace electronics in their compositions. And Detroit and Chicago are where house started. Music for warehouse parties, featuring new tracks and remixes of hits that enterprising nightlifers threw after these cities wouldn't let black and Latin folks open up clubs, and white clubs refused to let black and Latin people in. These were gay people, largely, and the pioneers of the genre had a sense of history. They grew up listening to Motown

and listening to Stevie. If we were to look at people today, I mean, the whole lineage of house music, dub, drum and bass, everything, can all go back to Stevie. Stevie's the first to really put it in the context that allowed anyone to kind of enjoy electronics within a pop context. So not just black music, but let's say pop, because a lot of those were pop songs too. For a long time,

the album's notoriety as weird, as indulgent, as instrumental, which it only partially is, has overshadowed its ambiance and ingenuity and texture. His Departure album was a departure from neither form nor style. Stevie enhanced those. The departure was on us. We departed from him. And that doesn't break a streak. It complicates it. And anyway, just a year later,

he was back to the old ways, back to a kind of classic form. And all those departed folks, they came right on back. Hey guys, this is Smokey Robinson, and I'm here today to talk about my brother, Stevie Wonder, who is my brother, brother, brother. The first time that I remember going on the road with Stevie

was when we took the Motor Tower Review out. The first stop was a theater in Chicago called the Regal Theater. There was a circuit of those theaters back in those days, and almost every city had one of those theaters. And it was the first tour that Stevie had ever gone out with us. Stevie came on. He was doing his singing. He did his act. I forgot what song he had out then. We had several band leaders at Motown who used to go out with the Mototown Reviews. And this particular time, a guy named Beans Bowles. And so Stevie had gone off and he was taking his bowels.

And Beans Bowles had the band to start a jazz riff. And the band was playing that. And Stevie took out his harmonica and started to just play what they were playing because that's who he is. He can just do that. Damn it. But that's what he did. And so they went along with Stevie. And then it just became a party. Now, Stevie and I have been traveling on the road all over the place. And you might be a person who does that too. And your home may be just sitting empty. Why let it be empty when it could be full? Turn it to an Airbnb

and earn some money while you're traveling. So if you're curious about this, just go to Airbnb.com slash host and find out more about it. On September 29th, 1980, Motown released Stevie Wonder's Hotter Than July. Ten songs that together aspire to no higher thematic aim than their overall individual excellence.

You didn't think I could make a fun album you could listen to in 40 minutes? Well, here, I did it. Stevie's sense of short and sweet songcraft is totally back, and in a way, that's another kind of freedom. The freedom to revisit past ideas and past sounds and not feel burdened by it. To hearken back to the past and to reimagine the future. Maybe that was a relief, since the first thing we hear is...

him letting out a slow-motion scream that's like the sound of a singer coming back into our ears. Focus. And he sounds ecstatic to be there. And, you know, a little ironically insecure. Did I hear you say you love me, Stevie? You know you did.

The thing I love about Hotter Than July, particularly if you're streak-oriented, is precisely the way in which it calls back not only to music of my mind, but to his Motown years. He even revisits his little Stevie days and records a new version of All I Do, a song he wrote at 16 with the mighty Motown composers Clarence Paul and Morris Broadnax

and was sung by Tammy Terrell. This is not an artist stalling out. This is somebody closing a circle. It's a return to form, I said it already. It's a return to what he knew worked, and it's a reminder to the critics that this isn't a fluke. All I do It's a plan.

Just think about you That first statement-free album in a streak is itself a statement. That's what you can hear on Hotter Than July, the closest he'd come to the silliness and looseness of Music of My Mind, the first album in the streak. And let's be clear, Stevie was returning to a regular Stevie sound with this album. But Hotter Than July also arrives on the verge of major music irregularity.

Disco and punk are morphing into the spikiness and glimmer of what's gonna get called new wave. Rappers are gonna start on their path to replacing rock stars. And the synthesizer and the drum machine are on their way to the center of pop music. And this album, in its diversity of genres, R&B, balladry, funk, country, reggae, it anticipates this evolution in pop.

It's ten distinct stops on the radio dial. Possible, of course. That all this innovation, this self-discovery through Tonto and the Dream Machine, this completely unique melody-driven approach to songwriting, the sideways philosophy of how a chord can progress, the utterly staggering harmonization of so many musical ideas, of so many musical ideas, jazz, gospel, R&B, rock, classical,

salsa, samba, funk, all of that into coherent, exhilarating gemstones. It's possible that everything there, that masterful synthesis, had helped so radically change what's possible for music and musicians that Stevie Wonder's own bar had been set so high that he could no longer just leap over it with as much clearance. I mean, he clears the bar on Hotter Than July, but it also means he has to land. He knew this, I think, because this is his last original album before he puts out a greatest hits album called Original Musicquarium.

It's an album that invents a new word and has four brand new songs, four jams. Jams you know, Do I Do, That Girl, Frontline, Ribbon in the Sky. It's an album that highlights the previous 10 years from 72 onward to say, yo, this is what I pulled off. That's the actual looking back. Not hotter than July. A package celebrating yesterday's achievements with the wisdom of a man who'd made 18 previous albums, two of them doubles, and was about to turn 32 years old. Can you believe that?

And that glance, that glance in the rearview mirror, that's what signals the end of the streak. It's also an acknowledgement that by 1982, his own radicalism, the faux coder work, the sampling, the belief in the possibilities of the keyboard were becoming the norm, the standard. And this blessed, ingenious man was on the verge of putting himself out of business because he was just that innovative. There's also this whole other aspect to his evolution at this point. And it involves another essential, crucial part of the Stevie Wonder experience. And I actually cannot believe we've made it this far

without exploring it more than passingly the way we did in episode four, talking about Boogie on Reggae Woman. I even had a whole conversation about it with Greg Fillinganes. So can I ask a question about the harmonica? Sure. You know, I am very curious to hear you talk about his relationship to that instrument and how it struck you. Like what was he doing that nobody else was doing? What was he bringing into his harmonica playing? And what's your understanding of what it meant when he would decide to incorporate it into a song? Well, that's the second most significant element

of his voice other than his voice. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know? So when you have something as portable as a harmonica... Yeah, yeah. ...that you can learn to manipulate, that's going to be your new best friend. That's a great point.

And over the course of time, he just developed a style of singing through playing that. Yes. He's singing through that harmonica, you know, and it's obviously a very unique sound and you always know who it is within two notes. Every time! Every time. It's unmistakable. You hear two notes and you go, oh that's Stevie. Arguably his harmonica playing, his exuberant life-giving harmonica playing on songs like his first hit Fingertips is what made Stevie a star. And it became such a rich wide-ranging extension of his human voice that it was easy to take for granted. Just a little bit of slow, slow, slow, slow, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Clap your hands just a little bit louder. Clap your hands just a little bit louder The harmonica, it's his second voice. And who else in popular music is synonymous with both the clavinet and the harmonica? And one of Stevie's baddest performances with that second voice is on That Girl, one of the new songs from Musicquarium and one of my personal five most played Stevie Wonder songs, one of my most beloved Stevie Wonder songs. It's actually lots of people's, including Denise Williams,

who as a member of Stevie's band Wonderlove would have sung all of Stevie's songs, but has a real soft spot for this one. What about your favorite Stevie Wonder song? That's funny. That Girl. Speak. That Girl is my favorite song of his. Okay.

Why? Because I remember coming into the studio with him, and he said, go out there and sing some notes for me. So I sang some notes and the next thing I knew I was in his computer. And when I hear that background, I hear my voice because that's me. Is that you? That's me. And so that's one of my favorite songs.

And the genius behind how he got that sound has always stuck with me. Wait, I just want to be clear about, is it that, ah, ah? I can't believe I'm making musical sounds to you, but is that what we're talking about? It's that. That's you? Yes, yes. Oh, my God. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. that that's you yes yes oh my mind, soul, and body need her.

Tell her that I love her, that I want her. Remember way back in episode one, where I mentioned that time Denise Huxtable crashed her car into Stevie? He invites most of the family to the studio and secretly grabs some audio of her and plays it back. This is what Stevie did to Denise Williams. He captured her singing, put it into his sampler, and uses it for the chorus,

which comes right before some of Stevie's mightiest, meatiest, tear-the-roof-off, have-a-smoke-when- when he's done harmonica work. Stevie's harmonica is his musical passport, and it's been letting him move in and out of all kinds of sonic landscapes since he was 12, making so many different people's music that much warmer, funkier, stickier. stickier. You're listening to the wonder of Stevie from Pineapple Street Studios, Higher Ground Audio and Audible. And do you want to hear more?

There's a very special bonus episode only on Audible featuring me, Wesley Morris, and former president Barack Obama in an enlightening conversation with Stevie Wonder himself. Visit audible.ca slash wonder to listen now. Getting bogged down by how much new music there is out there? There's a lot. Consider a daily dose of the All Songs Considered podcast. It's the easiest way to get tuned into the music world. We spend hours combing through the new music universe,

from emerging bands to time-tested icons, to bring you your next favorite artist. To get up on your music know-how, listen to All Songs Considered from NPR. In the 43 years since Hotter Than July, our collective sense of Stevie's ingenuity has gotten, I don't know, soft, gauzy, gradually squishier. Stevie's an ambassador of buoyancy and delight. Everybody's favorite uncle. Stevie has a meme. This shorthand for joy and a kind of vague greeting card-ish idea of love. For millions of people, a huge part of the Stevie Wonder experience

is the sensation of joy, true, pure happiness. One of Stevie's most beloved songs is called Overjoyed, and that's the feeling people get when they see him. That's the feeling he seems to be experiencing when he's around us. But the thing I'm trying to get at

is that something gets lost when we put angel's wings on a living artist. Stevie's facility with melody and chord structure, his wizardry with electronic production, his being a one-man band, even his message of love, his enduring belief in love as religion, in love as a treaty,

in love as medicine, we don't think about that now. We don't think about the now. We don't think about the sophistication of his love message or the scorn and confrontation and humor in so many of these songs. We all know Stevie Wonder is undeniably wonderful. There's no question about that. But his ubiquity kind of makes him invisible because he's simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. What I'm trying to say is, for all that he's been celebrated, I still don't think we've ever really fully appreciated just how revolutionary this man is.

When I was in my teens, there was a lot of radio stations that didn't play Stevie Wonder because they were playing Led Zeppelin. And the idea of playing them both in the same format, inconceivable. Inconceivable. Yeah. That's Barack Obama again. As someone who's been following Stevie since his childhood and since the beginning of this streak, I wanted to know, what does he think about this ubiquity versus invisibility question? Does Stevie get all the credit he deserves?

Top 40 wasn't segregated, but people's listening habits were segregated. And so I think that the degree to which they dominated popular culture during these periods wasn't comparable to the white artists, irrespective of their quality. I think you're, that's absolutely right. I think that, you know, just to give you the term that the Beatles, Dylan, Springsteen, Pink Floyd, it's album-oriented rock. It's not album-oriented R&B. Right.

And if we're thinking about the genres as being, you know, not so much sonically segregated, but racially segregated. Right. There was no opportunity, to your point, you're the first person to put it this way. And that's kind of a mind-expanding concept, which is what we now call deep cuts. Yeah. Those weren't deep cuts for Zeppelin fans, right? Nope. You just heard all nine songs on the radio.

Yes. You know, the culture is always trying to distinguish between high art and popular art. And I think that among the gatekeepers, at least, rock and rollers who created these encompassing artistic visions were elevated into high art. Yes, yes, yes. Whereas I think black artists, they were producing hits. And those in charge of the canon did not necessarily get it. Hits versus high art.

Who gets to make that call? Well, I mean, people like me, critics. And in the 1970s, when Stevie was at his peak, there were a lot of critics, a lot of rock critics, white rock critics. And those were the guys evaluating Stevie in his career. Guys like Robert Criscow, who we heard at the beginning of this episode. When I come in in 74, I really want to be covering as much black music as I can for what's conceived as the Village Voice audience. Well, Stevie Wonder really made that easy. Chris Gow created the Village Voice music section in 1969.

It didn't exist before him. They call him the Dean because he ushered in, mentored, hired, edited, championed generations of music critics and writers, whether or not they thought like he did. Now, Criscow is generally a Stevie Wonder fan. I want to say more or less, but it's mostly more. He even wrote Stevie's Kennedy Center Honors introduction. But critics are free to change, sharpen, double down on their feelings, and they should be. Robert Criscow actually excelled at those kinds of dynamics. Nearly five months after Fulfillingness'

first finale came out, he wrote a piece called Stevie Wonder is a Fool. Two years later, after Songs in the Key of Life's release, he wrote another review, and it was titled Stevie Wonder is a Masterpiece. All of that is to say, Criscow's opinion of Stevie Wonder, I mean, it's complicated.

Basically, what The Fool was about was to talk about his ideological naivete. And it was to acknowledge that a lot of the things he said sounded a little foolish and not as well-informed as they might be. So, in other words, I was taking the bull by the horn and saying, yes, only he's also a genius, and here's why. That was a good headline, although I must say, every once in a while I say, why did you have to do that? But I know, but it was the right thing to do. Journalistically, it caught everyone's attention.

And then I wrote this very positive piece about him. And I wrote an even more positive piece in the wake of Songs in the Key of Life. And listening back to some of those late albums that people think are terrible, they're not. Some of them are really rather good. Thank you. I wanted to ask Robert Kriskow about this canon idea. And if he thought, as one of the few people in charge of the canon, forming it, maintaining it, closing and opening its gates, if Stevie got all the recognition he deserved, I think that, you know, one of the things, and I think you've talked about this in terms of Stevie Wonder, you know, part of the reason that his canonization process to sort of be equivalent or even like remotely equivalent to what the Beatles get. You know what I think I would do here?

I would go back to the question of just exactly how world historic his voice itself is. And I would say that the Beatles as an entity, they're in a different league. And then what do you do about Mick Jagger? I'm sorry. I would think that I say that Mick Jagger? I'm sorry. I would think that, I say that Mick Jagger is in the end a more interesting singer

than Stevie Wonder. And now, we're getting down into the mortals here. Right. Right? The Rolling Stones are a great band,

but I don't believe that they belong in the same league as the Beatles or, for that matter, great Joni Mitchell. I'm wondering, again, because there's such a facility here, for that matter, great Joni Mitchell. I'm wondering, again, because there's such a facility here, right?

Like, you really are with Stevie in some ways. Your struggle is never with Stevie, right? Your struggle is with what kind of pantheon to put him in, right? Like, where alongside these other people to situate him? And, you know, in many ways, part of that facility in the writing has to do with a comfort with the degree to which this is black music, essentially, right? Or there are themes that Stevie's dealing with that involve black people. And I'm wondering partially whether you felt in on that, excluded from it, disqualified to think or write critically about it beyond the music and as, you know, black music, right? Yeah, sure, I felt that my qualifications were questionable.

But, I mean, do you know what I mean? Like, there being some kind of discourse among the critics about, or there being less of a contest about what was happening in the music. Or were there being less of a contest about what was happening in the music? There was Leroy Jones and A.B. Spellman writing about... But they were mostly thinking about jazz, right? They weren't thinking about pop music, right? And insofar as they wrote about pop, they didn't get it. Right, right, right. I'm thinking purely about pop because you...

But nobody wrote about pop. There was no serious writing about pop at all. No, no, no. I'm just saying in terms of, like, what was happening with pop music. Mm-hmm. And I guess—I mean, it's not really worth thinking about much more, but, like, the question of, like, who fell between the cracks. Who exactly in pop music you think shouldn't have fallen between the cracks when? I don't—I mean—

I mean, you know the history. Who would it be? It's easy— Ray Charles. Right. Who would it be? Ray Charles. Well, I'll take Ray Charles. Okay. I would take Stevie. Oh, I think Ray Charles was... I'm not,

this is not a hierarchy. I would, I mean, you've taken Ray. I would take Stevie Wonder, right? I would say that, you know, Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace, for instance, is, I think, one of the greatest recordings ever. You have a great majority about that record, and I don't like it. I know. I mean, I don't like it because I don't like gospel music. Right. And especially in its most grandiose forms. I like it as small group music, okay. Right. But the grandiose stuff,

I don't like grandiose. I don't like opera either. Right. I mean, I think that that is one of the great recordings. But one of the reasons to talk to you was because you were one of the few people

to take him seriously at all. How did you feel about the gospel elements of Stevie, though, in that way? Did you... Well, look,

or Aretha Franklin, I mean... Well, I mean, specifically with Stevie, did you, I mean... I'm sorry, no. Uh or Aretha Franklin. Well, I mean, specifically with Stevie, did you... No. I'm sorry. No. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I mean, when Stevie comes up, I don't really know anything about gospel music.

I mean, did Stevie even go to church? I don't actually know what... I don't know what the biographical facts are. Well, I mean, he spent time as a kid in the church. He wanted to be a preacher for a while. But I mean, you know, half a Motown song was a gospel song in many ways, right?

And the kind that... Now, I'm sorry, you know, I can say I like these groups and I do, but I can't make those connections in any kind of a meaningful way. This is tricky. It's really tricky. I mean, how can you listen to Stevie Wonder and not hear gospel?

And look, the last thing I want to do is discredit Robert Crisco. He's the dean for a reason. He's made me a better critic and a sharper listener. Plus, he loves hotter than July, so he's aces in my book. Everybody's got things they dislike or don't get. What I'm thinking about is more about the cultural machinery that builds artists' legacies. When you're a tastemaker, I mean a really important part of that machinery, those knowledge gaps, biases really, they can be consequential. And so this gospel question, it really, really matters. Gospel music is foundational to the Black experience,

therefore to pop music, and therefore to this country. White Americans, I mean, they know about church, but Black people, I don't know. I mean, it's our church, our gospel, Stevie's gospel. It's just different. And I'm not saying that everything Robert Crisco and his peers who wrote about Stevie Wonder and any number of Black artists during this period, before it, and after it, I don't want to say they were wrong because I don't like that formulation.

But if you don't want to hear the gospel in it, there's something you're also neglecting to hear in this music. And it can't be missed. It's ever-present. We know it's there. We hear it because it's ours. Because Stevie Wonder's music is black music. Sure, he was on tour with the Rolling Stones

and the people who give out Grammys love him. He was on Sesame Street, for God's sake. This guy's for everybody. But more than anything, it's music about Black life with Black church roots for Black people to love and understand. There's also something important when it comes to how we remember this music and how we appreciate it that is meaningful when you think about the fact that the people who kind of put it on the track to permanent greatness and canonization weren't concerned with the significant portion of what that music was trying to say and access and do and who it was trying to reach. And that's something that has been weighing on me for a long time. I didn't need Robert Criscow to tell it to me. I sensed it. I could read it in the pieces themselves. When I talked to Barack Obama about some of this, he reframed it really well for me.

literature, right? Tony Morrison, Sula, Bluest Eye are exceptional works, but it's not really until Song of Solomon and then Beloved that Tony Morrison is discussed in the same way that a John Cheever, for example, is discussed, despite the fact that those earlier novels by Tony are as good as any novels that I would say better, but that's just my opinion. Counts for a lot, yes. Because they were treated differently at that time. Look at this excellent black female writer. I was just about to say, to your point, it's because those books are about black people experiencing other black people.

Right. And they're about a black world that does not involve white people. Right. So there's no, quote, way in. Well, that's exactly right. And I want to pick up on that because I think what I was describing about Stevie is similar to what Tony does in the sense that it's not obsessed with our interactions with the white world. The suggestion is there's a universality and a relevance and a depth in this world that is

worthy, just like James Joyce's Dublin is worthy. And it takes a while for folks to see that. Just to set Stevie Wonder aside for a second, this story, this situation, it's old. It's as old as this country. Black people having to try harder, be smarter, more talented, more skilled, just to get somebody to put eyes on them, let alone be recognized, awarded, lionized. And so I'm hung up on this Stevie Wonder's case because I want him to have all the recognition imaginable. But I think the problem has been all these years with the people who make these cannons

and the way they think about the album as an art form. In the minds of some of those people, Stevie Wonder makes hits, not high art. He makes songs, not albums. But what about us? All of us over here in Stevie's camp, with his art hanging high. You know how people now be like, you went platinum in my house.

It's just like he was like diamond in our house, so I didn't know what people were saying about him, you know? This is the recording artist, Meriba. Stevie Wonder's been a part of her musical diet since before she could speak. But beyond that, Stevie's been a beacon. And, of course, a kind of blueprint for her approach to music, but also just life. I met him one night and it went from just kind of a simple encounter to us sitting at the piano together and playing and singing together. And, you know, I'm telling you about my family and he loves Ethiopia.

He loves Ethiopian food. Like he's speaking Amharic to me. I'm like, OK, this is crazy, you know. So she played Stevie some of her music and he really liked it. He even gave her the push she needed to really put herself out there. And I was still just second guessing myself. And he was just like, no, no, no, just do it yourself. Trust me, just do it yourself. He said, you're doing yourself a disservice to not answer what God's telling you to do in general in life. Doing yourself a disservice to not answer what God's telling you to do in general in life. Mariba's talked to Stevie about his life and his music and what it all means.

Because of that, she has a different perspective on how the world sees his music. I just think in spaces made by white people, designed by white people to celebrate anything, we tend to be an afterthought. And we're literally over here screaming from the mountaintops like, this shit is genius. This is important. And this is groundbreaking. And it feels like it's always after some white artist has stolen it and repurposed it that it is like, oh, wow, a black person made it. Okay, on to the next thing. It's like, to be innovative, in my personal opinion, is almost to not be fully received properly by white spaces. Like I take that as a compliment to be very honest, because I feel like if I'm being celebrated in the moment by spaces that were never designed for my people to get truly free, then I got to wonder why,

you know, why I'm acceptable in those spaces and why they want to celebrate me. So I think that Stevie was absolutely celebrated by the people who needed to hear what he was saying the most and everybody else caught up and that's okay. I hear what Mariba is saying here. The history of this country doesn't lie on that front. There are too many examples of slights and insulting oversights and questionable, uncomfortable affinities

to trust in the music world the embrace of the establishment. Of course, the establishment's enthusiasm wasn't exactly a problem for Stevie. Three of this streak's masterworks, Inner Visions, Fulfilling This Is First finale, and Songs in the Key of Life, they all won Grammys for Album of the Year. The industry's top prize, that's something that never happened

for some of the 70s' most important acts. Not for Elton John, Eagles, or the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. Never even nominated! In one sense, the Grammys weren't cool. They acknowledged a kind of middle-of-the-roadness. But for a white artist,

those are omissions that could be refashioned as badges of honor. For a Black artist, being voted the best even by the coot who gave out the Grammys is a milestone. A white artist might have the luxury of being too cool for school, but for Black America, Stevie's acclaim was a kind of apex. None of us had ever been up there before. And only once during this run was he even ever up against another Black artist for that top Grammy. So it felt like Stevie was standing in for a whole, that he was a delegate for all of blackness and all of black music, which isn't fair to Stevie

or to the scores of other very different, also great artists who were his contemporaries, who were also ignored by the very establishment that awarded Stevie because the establishment happened to choose him. I've got to admit to be the sort of sad person who's really come to understand the power of popular culture myths, in part because I help take them apart,

in part because I help build them. I'm a critic, and that's part of what I do. But how do I know that the Beatles and Miles Davis and Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell are these titanic, essential artists? Well, I've been told that my entire life. Not by my family necessarily, but by these establishments. I didn't get that with Stevie Wonder. There were no specials devoted to how good he was.

I didn't experience him ambiently referenced in other people's writing. Not nearly as chronically and fanatically as other artists were. I even have a touch of identification with Robert Crisco. You don't know unless you know. It's also possible that these slights, they have a way of fulfilling themselves. I was raised in a house where gospel music was a food group. I had the Clark sisters and Andre Crouch and Shirley Caesar.

I had Mahalia Jackson and Inez Andrews and Aretha Franklin. But it's possible that I took that music for granted and thought it was uncool as I got to that age. I had to learn for myself how much at the center of so much American music, gospel music was. I had to learn for myself how much at the center of so much American music, gospel music was. I had to be educated. And a lot of the people doing that educating and evaluating, the critics, for example, had never known how valuable this music was.

So even though I knew it, it was less valuable to me. This is a long way of saying that maybe we don't value Stevie Wonder enough in part because we have never been trained to value what he made. It's not good enough that we think of Stevie Wonder as great. When obviously he's one of the very greatest. Period. greatest. Period. There's a type of legacy that gets consecrated and proliferated by textbooks and newspapers and magazines and TV interviews. The type that's cemented in star plaques on walks of fame and inductions into halls of fame. Records other people will never touch, then there's a different kind of legacy.

The legacy that's wrapped up in the fabric of everyday people's lives. Happy birthday, Dr. King. Forty years ago today, I was marching in the cold and snowy streets of Washington, D.C., where thousands of people all believed in the right and the power to convince Congress that this national holiday was needed. Not just to honor this man of peace, but to honor the principle of peace and unity. This is the man himself, Stevie Wonder, in a video he put on Twitter this year. It was a sort of open letter that he directed to Dr. Martin Luther King,

explaining the fight to get Dr. King's civil rights activism commemorated as a holiday, as its own national holy day, the day of Dr. King's birth, January 10th. And Stevie helped lead that charge. There was a Democratic House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican president. We reached across differences, and in August 1983, the bill to make Dr. King's birthday a national holiday passed the Democratic House of Representatives 338 to 90. In October 1983, that bill passed the Republican Senate 78 to 22.

And President Ronald Reagan signed that bill into law on the 2nd of November, 1983. Even though I wasn't in the picture, we all were there in the Rose Garden. He means he wasn't in the literal photograph taken at the signing, but the song he wrote to establish Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday, that was the capstone of his activism. And it wasn't too fancy either. He called it Happy Birthday. Symbols are a tricky thing. They only have as much meaning as we give

them. Because of that, what can seem trivial to one person can be so important to somebody else. It can make you feel like you're fighting for the most important thing in the world and for crumbs at the same time. Their meaning can also become invisible to you through time, becoming just a motion or a thing or a song. The last track on Hotter Than July is that motion, that song. Activism that becomes anthem, an anthem that becomes part of people's everyday lives.

Black people have two national anthems. Lift every voice and sing, and then there's this. Stevie Wonder's version of Happy Birthday. At any black American's birthday, the following ritual happens. A cake appears. Candles are lit. The original boring version of Happy Birthday gets sung.

People finish. They look at each other. And then they start singing the one that Stevie TV-ro for Dr. Martin Luther King. Folks clap on the two and the four and celebrate the passing of another year of life. And if you're lucky, they do the whole freaking song. Just how much we love you. And I'm sure you would agree. What could fit more perfectly than to have a world party on the day you came to be? Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday.

Happy birthday to you. It's the black birthday song for sure. That's Michelle Obama. And she's got her plate in one hand and her birthday hat on her head. So she too is waiting for the beat to drop. I don't remember the first time when it became about more than just Martin Luther King and the celebration of his birthday. When it just became about the celebration of us and our aging process as a community, as a people. It jumped from this one political purpose to the broader thing that it is for us now.

This is the song of all of our lives, the way we celebrate all of our coming of age and leave it to Stevie to understand that this song could become that. I don't know that that was his intent when he wrote it outside of getting the holiday locked in, but whoa, it's all of our birthday songs now. And I think in a weird way, isn't that the MLK-est thing ever? Yes, that is the MLK-est thing ever. Yes, that is the MLK-est thing ever.

This, of course, is a curious power of this song. The way it equates this man of the people with the people themselves. Stevie wrote it to urge the government to make the commemoration of King's birthday a national holiday. But anybody using this happy birthday, on your granny, on your bestie, using this happy birthday on your granny, on your bestie, is commemorating that you, black person, made it another year in this country. Nobody really thinks about this, but that's what's happening. Somebody sent me a TikTok video not too long ago, and you know how these things are usually. It's short, and I don't exactly know what I was watching for. It's of a little boy. He's maybe five. His hair is in four braids. He's got a pair of black and white Nikes, and they match his jeans and his black shirt.

He's the only visible person in the shot, but you can hear offscreen his teachers and all his classmates celebrating this special day of his. Happy birthday to you. And he's looking around and smiling, patient, but clearly waiting for something else. And when the class finishes the song, this little boy is confused. Wait, you can get the, like, the singing one. The what one? When I said, how old are you now?

The teacher tries to guess, what do you mean by the singing one? Like the happy. He means this. Happy birthday to ya. Happy birthday to ya. Happy birthday. I'm watching this kid's confusion and how he knows something is off. How that something happens to be the absence of Stevie.

And something's occurring to me. This entire show, every person I've spoken to for it, and everybody I've spoken to in my life who loves Stevie Wonder, fell in love at this very crucial moment in their development, when they were young. It's funny because this is music that's always felt grown up to me, felt grown up to me, wise. But it was written and recorded by a young man who started writing and performing and recording as a child. Adults got Stevie, but the Stevie we got as children really sticks with us. The complexity of innocence and loss and disillusionment and hope, and loss and disillusionment and hope, that sense of adventure. Children could hear that this music was sophisticated. So maybe it's not cool, but it's true. It's pure. It was hours before we knew

what the world was, how it worked, what it sounded like. He's Stevie Wonder, obviously, He's Stevie Wonder, obviously. But for so many of us, he was very simply Wonder. And lots of us are holding on to that. We are passing it down. That little boy's confusion at not hearing Stevie Wonder on his birthday is the definition of legacy. The canon is streaks and charts and reissues. It shows like this one.

But the canon is also this kid in 2023 knowing what the real happy birthday is. The canon is us. Happy birthday to ya. Happy birthday to ya. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday.

This has been a Higher Ground and Audible original. The Wonder of Stevie is produced by Pineapple Street Studios. Higher Ground Audio and Audible. Our senior producer is Josh Gwynn. Producer is Janelle Anderson. Associate producer is Mary Alexa Cavanaugh. Senior managing producer is Asha Saluja. Executive editor is Joelelle Anderson. Associate producer is Mary Alexa Cavanaugh. Senior managing producer is Asha Saluja. Executive editor

is Joel Lovell. Archival producer is Justine Daum. Fact checker is Jane Drinkard. Head of sound and engineering is Raj Makija.

Senior audio engineers are Davey Sumner, Pedro Alvira, and Marina Pais. Assistant audio engineers are Jade Brooks and Sharon Bardalas. Mixed and mastered by Davey Sumner and Raj Makija. Additional engineering Thank you. music and Raj Makija. Additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. Our

choir was voiced by Keisha Chantrell, Christine Noel, Carlos Abraham, and Jamal Moore, directed and arranged by Jarrett Jenkins. Produced by Raj Makija and Josh Gwynn. Special thanks to Ronnie O'Hannon and Javon Haskin at Greylock

Agency and Silla Gospel Choir. Horns by Sunday by Odi Emanuel and Luis Alves. Hosted and executive produced by Wesley Morris. Higher ground executive producers are Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Corinne Gilliard-Fisher, Dan Fehrman and Mukta Mohan.

Creative executive for higher ground is Janae Marable. Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky. Audible Executive Producers are Kate Navin and Nick D'Angelo. The Wonder of Stevie is also executive produced by Amir Questlove-Thompson, Anna Holmes, and Stevie Wonder. Questlove is the producer of this show courtesy of iHeart

and can also be heard on Questlove Supreme from iHeart Podcasts. Recorded at Different Fur, Patches, The Hobby Shop, and Pineapple Street Studios. Head of Creative Development at Audible is Kate Navin. Chief Content Officer is Rachel Giazza. Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio LLC.