Innervisions

About

<b>100 Best Albums</b> On the heels of his first post-Motown-emancipation masterpiece <i>Music of My Mind</i>, 1972 was Stevie Wonder’s biggest year yet. He opened for The Rolling Stones on their enormous US summer tour, exposing his exploratory soul-funk hybrid to countless rock fans, and released his second opus <i>Talking Book</i> before the end of the year. An April 1973 <i>Rolling Stone</i> interview dubbed the erstwhile teen-pop star “The Formerly Little Stevie Wonder” and quoted the 23-year-old as saying that he wanted to “get in as much weird shit as possible”; 1973’s <i>Innervisions</i> was a start. The boldest political statement of Wonder’s career yet—assailing drug addicts, infrastructural racism, charismatic con men, and superficial Christians—<i>Innervisions</i> was also deliriously funky and boundary-pushing. Wonder played and produced just about everything, with the help of his experimentally minded studio sous-chefs Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. The musical peaks were as high as Wonder would ever get, though the tone was more pointed than ever. “Living for the City” is a feverish seven-minute operetta about the unforgiving toll of urban life for the Black working class in the post-Black Power moment. With the journalistic soul of Marvin Gaye’s <i>What’s Going On</i> broadcast straight from the street corner and central booking, “Living” is among the most scathingly beautiful indictments of the American justice system. The album-ending slow burn “He’s Misstra Know-It-All” suavely identifies the character types who prey on those same marginalized people, including, many surmised, the soon-to-resign “law and order”-claiming US president. There’s salvation to be found in “Higher Ground,” an impossibly groovy sequel to <i>Talking Book</i>’s No. 1 funk odyssey “Superstition” that asserts Wonder’s belief in reincarnation over his trademark wah-wah clavinet and Moog bass; the tongue-in-cheek Latin workout “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” a Dylanesque barb at a social climber delivered with a potent display of Wonder’s bottomless charm; and the hopelessly romantic “Golden Lady,” which spirals upward into the kind of ecstatic joy that only Wonder could generate. Both a kiss-off to late-’60s hippie optimism and a pathway to numerous possible spiritual futures, <i>Innervisions</i> cemented Wonder as the most inspired and singular mind in 1970s American popular music.

via Apple Music