Mojo - The Music Magazine

...SEE NUMBER 3

Stevie Wonder
Talking Book
(Tamla Motown, 1972)

Epic tunes and existential unease from a stone-cold genius.

The two greatest melodists of the rock era are Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney. Neither seems to have full control over their melodic “gush”; they almost never let anything get in the way of the vocal and sometimes their songs seem built for the sheer joy of singing. Both are loved by the masses of music fans for their fearless unselfconsciousness and sometimes maligned by the chin-strokers as vendors of cheese. But you can’t have one without the other, and for every sceptic of Talking Book’s marmite opener, You Are The Sunshine Of My Life, there are a thousand suckers for its uninhibited whistleability and emotional boldness. In 1972, Wonder’s continuing push towards studio self-sufficiency meant more work for TONTO (“The Original New Timbral Orchestra”), the polyphonic synthesiser created by Talking Book’s “associate producers” Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil that announces the rubbery Maybe Your Baby, and of course, squelches all across the awesome Superstition, but it’s not the only sonic novelty. In fact, no other record sounds quite like Talking Book, an album borne aloft on bubbles, simultaneously lite yet sophisticated on the jazzoid You’ve Got It Bad Girl, irresistibly bittersweet Tuesday Heartbreak and the autumnal folkfunk of Big Brother. The latter is another staging post on Wonder’s political journey, a deceptively honeyed assault on the self-serving representatives of a white American status quo who “killed all our leaders” but will bring themselves down through their own iniquity. Talking Book is about the tunes, but it’s also about the times – and that’s the spoonful of medicine that helps the melodic sugar go down.

Danny Eccleston

MORE MOTOWN! Check out this month’s issue of MOJO magazine to discover the 100 Greatest Motown Tracks!