Music I used to like #9: the happiest fruit of cultural appropriation

Stevie Wonder: ‘He’s Misstra Know-it-All’ (from Innervisions, 1973)

HERE’S THE THING about Stevie Wonder. Great, as he is, he might have been even greater if he hadn’t been so susceptible to lapses in taste. You know… “Isn’t She Lovely?”, “Ebony and Ivory”, “I Just Called to Say I Love You”, that awful phase when the Stevie picture went fuzzy-peach and then, rather later on, when it came back into focus, it appeared to be showing the same thing as before, yet the same thing somehow adulterated. I completely lost connection at that point — only ever engaged briefly with one more of his albums after the moderate Hotter Than July, in 1980. I may as well say it: I’ve never even heard The Secret Life of Plants. I know that I am not alone.

I recall once writing that Stevie Wonder’s hit singles in the 1970s constituted “a ribbon of warmth” stitched into the austere fabric of that grimmest of postwar, pre-millennial decades, and I haven’t really changed my view. The fabric of our various lives was not strengthened as a direct consequence of the inclusion of Stevie Wonder’s ribbon, nor did it change in its essential nature, but life certainly felt enriched by it and people seemed to like the world in which they lived more too. They really did. I know, I was there.

We are of course talking about the run of considerable hits that began in 1972 with the ecstatic clavinet boinks of “Superstition” and then extended itself into a silken ripple of songs that always managed to quieten the maddest dog in the street without having to sedate it first: “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” through “Higher Ground”, “Livin’ for the City”, “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing”, “He’s Misstra Know-it-All”, “You Haven’t Done Nothin’”, “Boogie on Reggae Woman” and “I Wish”, before he hit the buffers of bad taste (oh, all right then, “the buffers of excessive sentimentalism”) with a resounding squelch in 1976. The reason? That yipping puppy-in-a-basket-of-ribbons that was “Isn’t She Lovely?”. The song was never actually released as a single, contrary to what both you and I might think; but as album tracks go, album tracks that loose a warning shot across the bows, “Isn’t She Lovely?” was a full 48-gun broadside at point-blank range, endangering your bows grievously. Things were never going to be the same again after that, especially as Wonder himself was revealed to be the reason it was not released as a 45rpm single: because he loved it so much at its full seven-minute-plus duration that he could not bring himself to sanction the edit needed to make it fit for radio.

Number one in our hearts, then.

The horror, oh the horror…

How could Wonder’s sensibilities have mutated so grossly, when almost the entire length of that drear decade had been decorated in joyful sequence, one after another, by the heavy bunting of his talent, four albums of innovative musicianship, sharp social criticism and sheer unbridled soul joy. By the time of his supposed masterpiece, Songs in the Key of Life, in 1976, Wonder was established as one of postwar American music’s great auteurs, with complete authority over his artistic methods and the ability and confidence to always reach further and for more — a new Ray Charles, a true heir at last to Duke Ellington. His songs? He composed them, he played them, he sang them, he produced them, he flogged them enthusiastically, he embodied his music as a projection of his own outrage and joy in the world, and perhaps his privileged place in its seating arrangements. In the era before the onset of adult Michael Jackson and then Prince, each acting as if he were the sole holder-by-right of the ignition key to black American pop’s creative engine, Stevie Wonder had only one serious rival as Soul Auteur Number One, Marvin Gaye, and Marvin was seldom fit to drive a pedal car, let alone the kind of thing soul superstars liked to party in. The blind kid, on the other hand, he never wanted to relinquish his grip on the steering wheel, not even for a second.

Consider, if you dare…

Music of My Mind (1972) was the first to reveal the kid’s extraordinary adaptiveness, aged 21, already ten years a veteran of pop’s commercial frontline. He was able to play just about every proper instrument you can think of (except perhaps the rauschpfeife, and you wouldn’t bet against Stevie mastering that, given half a day in the broom cupboard …).Well, now he was also capable of addressing head-on the sci-fi monstrosity that was Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff’s TONTO modular synthesizer grid. TONTO’s Expanding Head Band, as the two-man operation preferred to identify itself, was an aggregated music thing composed of most of the monophonic analog synths of the day lashed together — strictly speaking, wired together — to create an unwieldy but usable polyphonic synthesizer orchestra. Unlike the standard monophonic synth product, then barely even available off the peg, this enormity could do two or more different things at once, if you knew how to tickle it good, stuff the right socket with the ideal jack and really influence those oscillators. But still, tricky to get even a hummable tune out of such a monster, you’d think.

Not apparently for young Master Wonder, who took to it like the proverbial duck and used it to convert a hash of decent and half-decent songs (romantic ballads, remonstrances, booty articulators) into a musical form that most thought they’d never encounter in their lives: electronic music with soul.

Talking Book (1972) came out about six months after Music of My Mind and elevated the songwriting quality to a significantly more sophisticated level — some would say too far, but not me — while the understanding of what this remarkable tech array could be made to do in the service of song seems only to have deepened the boy Wonder’s ridiculous surface talent. Yet even Talking Book had to accept shade when the true masterpiece of the Wonder canon came out the following year and quickly registered itself as one of the great “crossover” must-have albums of all time. Even discerning juvenile rock fans had to have it. And I still think you can look and listen to the thing from any angle you like, and you will struggle to find a lump or a bubo. Innervisions (1973) is father to the best side two of any R&B album ever made. Its first side is no slouch either; and it remains the case in my view, after more than fifty years, that the exquisitely toned cover art still recommends itself as a kind of Afro-Transcendental fresco worthy to be insinuated into the damp plaster on the wall of any basilica in the world. Innervisions conferred on me the benison of knowing that pop music did not actually need loud guitars to be great and, beyond that thought — way beyond, now I think about it — the understanding that true originality is not the child of novel strategy in the pursuit of complexity, but so often the heir to simple curiosity. Like, wow! Who knew?

Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974) was just about substantial enough as a transitional follow-up, burdened as it was with a daft title, but it bore no hits as powerful as any one of the four delivered by Innervisions, while it did reasonable duty as a place-holder for what everyone knew was going to be, when it came, the towering confirmation of … er … What? Something enormous, that’s for sure. Indeed, as I recall, it was hinted that the Remarkable Mr Wonder would discard TONTO and its amiable creators Mal and Bob, lock, stock and barrel-organ, and instead push out alone, untethered and afloat in the pursuit of limitless autonomous exploration of synthetic space, for art’s sake and for the sake of the people. Hype was cheap in those days, whereas the expensive products of ARP, Moog, Oberheim and Roland would at least do Mr Wonder’s bidding and we, the hopeful, would find ourselves enraptured, awed and all the rest of it. Really. That was definitely what was going to happen. Everyone said so.

In the end Songs in the Key of Life (1976) was something of a disappointment, despite its vastness and obvious technical accomplishment, and even having considered the authentic beauty of Stevie’s manipulation of the Yamaha GX-1 ‘Dream Machine’ in order that he, Stevie, might reconceive the moves and texture of an 18^th-century string quartet (but not sound exactly like one). “Village Ghetto Land” and “Pastime Paradise” are both lovely. “Sir Duke” was great too, as was “As”, and the pleading simplicity of “Love’s in Need of Love Today” back up there at the top — c’mon, who kicks off a sprawling double album with a darkly succulent harmony-stacked lamentation, set casually to simple chording on a Fender Rhodes electric piano? Who else?

But Songs lacked coherence and warmth and there was certainly a sense that the new Duke Ellington had not embraced his idioms with sufficient sensitivity to enable a truly new synthesis of all black America’s parts, at depth. The album sounded too much like an arbitrary assemblage of technical achievements and stylistic features, and nothing like a step beyond Innervisions. And most unhappily of all, it contained one of pop history’s most sugar-boiled songs of simple, unfettered sentimental happiness. There it was, ingratiating as a canker hanging on to the top of side three, the giveaway, the betrayal, the toxin that would poison the Wonder well for all time. He just couldn’t stop himself, could he? Couldn’t resist.

But then again, if we are to understand Stevie Wonder phenomenologically, for what he is, and always was — as opposed to how we might prefer him to be — we have to go with the sobering thought that “Isn’t She Lovely?” is every bit is as much a part of his gestalt as “Livin’ for the City” and “You Haven’t Done Nothin’”. Stevie had form. He had always sung about happy feelings, and sometimes with lurid sentimentality, which is of course a really difficult subject to write and sing about — not without getting on someone’s tits. But, I have to ask, if happy gives you the ick, then what are you doing here? Stevie Wonder will always go the extra mile for happiness and he will always alight on those instances of great joy that you yourself are compelled to poke with a finger and sniff at. That’s because he is Stevie Wonder. And I for one couldn’t be happier that he seems to have always been around, somewhere out there, fuzzy or not, full of sentimental shit or not. “Isn’t She Lovely?” in its soggy nappy is the price you have to pay for his very particular kind of brotherly love. Although there are times when it feels like the very best kind of parental love.

STEVIE WONDER SEES the world with the eyes of a blind man, does he not? As it is illuminated in his songs, his is a world that is sometimes overbright, overstated, excessively played for those with conventional eyesight; it dazzles too much — yet conversely, his blighted eye is all too capable of discovering new glimmers in the darkness of no-sight: every time he gets it down the way he wants it; every time he pops a big, tricky interval and it comes straight out; every time the groove sits right back in the pocket. Shivers, uplift, real joy: there are few musicians I can think of whose physical response to what they’re doing musically is so audible in the music they’re doing. Wonder’s voice, though light, has texture and a fearsome press to it, and it pops and bumps almost like no other voice. It is wonderfully responsive to its environment and it’s not difficult to imagine why that should be. His abiding need for fluency is an indication of something of that nature. And that is why his music is as chromatic as it is; chromatic and stepped, music that follows its own proximal logic as Stevie must follow the logic of his touch and feel. Close, intense. Fluid wherever possible. Tumbling often, whether or not we get the hillside. It is conservative in many ways, his music, but it is not afraid to touch you. If you like, the music sees you — through Stevie’s hands as they play. The world he actually lives in, remember, is immensely real to him, just as yours is to you, but more so because he can’t see what’s going on out here. He has inner vision. He knows that leaves are green and that “they only turn to brown when autumn comes around.” If it’s a problem at all, it is our problem that we don’t know what green is in his mind, still less what he understands exactly by green going brown. It can’t be just a rhyme, can it? And even if it is, does that really matter?

You cannot know how sad I am that I can’t hear Stevie Wonder anymore and in particular the song of his I have loved the longest and the most uncomprehendingly. “He’s Misstra Know-it-All” was a hit single in the spring of 1974 as I turned fourteen, the fourth to come from Innervisions, after “Higher Ground”, “Living for the City” and “Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing”; the only one in fact to scrape into the top ten. I bought the album because of “Misstra Know-It-All”. It is said to be about Richard Nixon. Really? Cobblers.

No. It’s about this man, right, who…

It was played on the radio all the time, but I wanted it to be mine with a ferocity I reflect on fifty-plus years later with tolerance. I wanted to take possession of it and all its brother and sister songs on the album, sort of as if I wanted to join their family. I remember carrying the LP home on the bus and taking peeks at its beautiful cover art but without actually removing it from its bag. If that sounds suspiciously furtive then that’s because it was. At thirteen going on fourteen I was a skinny, greasy little prog-rocker and Stones fan and the purchase of a “soul” record sat uneasily with me, not because I thought I shouldn’t buy records made by black Americans, but because I wasn’t entirely convinced that I wouldn’t attract the wrong kind of attention on the top deck of the bus, which as usual was packed with ‘soul boys’ and ‘girls’ — all white of course, this being the Fens in the 1970s. Stevie Wonder was a particularly prized fruit of their vine and I worried that they might take against me for my blatant cultural appropriation — although I wouldn’t have called it that at the time and nor would they.

The reason I can no longer hear the music is because the auditory damage inflicted principally in my cochlea and the surrounding bits of electrical kit is focused on the middle reaches of the frequency range — and “He’s Misstra…”, like every other song on Innervisions, is a very middle-y piece of music. I can listen to it, but not without physical strain and some emotional upset. The melody I have to supply myself (just like bringing a bottle to a party, really) and the chords caressed so tenderly yet generously by the maestro at his piano are lost in the horrible distortions of pitch and tonality that go on in my inner ear, to such an extent that the song appears to change key at least twice in every bar through the weird tugging and twisting of each element of the sound that registers pitch. This is particularly cruel because one of my favourite features of the harmony — and it’s something I like whoever does it, in whatever context — is the way the second-move chord in the song “slips” from a major subdominant to a minor, easy as water watched tumbling in a woodland runnel. But these are really Stevie’s broken chord articulations. Gorgeous, if you can hear it, not so gorgeous if your own brain has to supply it — and by the time it arrives the song is already giving the impression that it’s on its third or fourth key-change. Where am I? Which is up and what is down?

But that’s in my brain only. It’s one of the things I prize about “Misstra Know-It-All” in objective reality, that it doesn’t change key at all, or even modulate, even though it uses the odd minor or seventh chord ‘borrowed’ from other keys which remain no more than implied — but it never goes there. “Beedle-bum beedle-bum … Got a coun-’er-feit dollar in ’is hay-and… he-e-e’s Misstra …” It just flows on down the hill and it gathers voices as it goes, like tributaries, all Stevie’s of course. More and more Stevies, heading no doubt for some mahoosive Wonder Delta further downstream, where all the Stevies teem. But all is calm here at the point of origin. And if Willie Weeks’ bass is the hill and the piano is the water tumbling down it, the music sometimes shelving for the brief duration of a few added bars while the song gathers itself for another tumble… Hold, hold fast …Yet the trajectory of Wonder’s vocal line, over the long stretch, is up and up in both pitch and dynamic… notice well, my child, how you have been blessed with ‘contrary motion’, after a fashion, which JS Bach would consider splendid at least.

And then the (I think) dominant-seventh ride over the edge of the expected metre of the second bridge, another gathering moment … and then a half-beat caesura in which to catch your breath and… Sss-Spat-ss-ss-pat!

Syncopated handclaps. How I love them. Then…

“Burrh-urh-buh! … Burrh-burh! … buh burrh-buh-buh burrh-uh…!”

Now he’s getting really serious. He’s doing his Gospel burps. Which is the point I start to cry, traditionally.

Would you excuse me for a moment?

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press