Mojo - The Music Magazine

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Stevie Wonder
Innervisions
(Tamla Motown, 1973)

Social commentary and spiritual searching fill Wonder’s second funk-propelled masterpiece.

If 1972’s Talking Book saw Stevie Wonder merely hinting at the socio-political unrest of early-’70s America, then the following year’s Innervisions faced the darkness head on. Witness the seven-and-a-half minute, clavinet-stomp of Living For The City – a biting exposé of metropolitan decay in which the boy “born in hard time Mississippi” struggles to find a job “’cause where he lives they don’t use colored people”. In order to draw the required level of venom from Wonder’s vocals, co-producers Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil began stopping the tape mid-take, infuriating their artist who, one assumes, had enough on his mind, having already played every instrument on the record. Elsewhere there’s the queasy anti-chemical funk of Too High and his dig at the Nixon administration’s political chicanery – the mellifluously mocking He’s Misstra Know-It-All. This is Motown’s golden boy grappling with the murky flipside of the American dream. But for all the talk of daily danger and strife, his burning spiritual optimism, first crystallized two years earlier on 1971’s Music Of My Mind, still thrives. The insistent sermonizing shuffle of Higher Ground (written and recorded in an astonishing three-hour whirlwind) and the jazzy uplift of Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing both prove that in the world of Stevie Wonder, hope continued to spring eternal. Primarily recorded at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, Innervisions is another masterclass of instrumental ingenuity and studio suss, but its genius lies in the concise arrangements – most fuelled by the pulse of Margouleff and Cecil’s TONTO synthesizer – and the clarity of his message. “I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow / And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow,” he pleads during Living For The City. Never had the man’s quest sounded so convincing.

Ross Bennett

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