“Is Stevie Wonder Congenitally Underrated by White, Male Critics?”

Just a second ago, I put down my Kierkegaard book, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life [1]. Christ, it was just too depressing. I was reading Kierkegaard’s tale about a gravestone that depicts the words “The Unhappiest One,” a structure which conceals a grave that contains no body. The idea, apparently, is that he envisions this as his rightful place, a place precociously unoccupied all the while. It did, anyway, jibe with this one really dark thought I had that whenever one is reading the absolute best literature of all time, it’s perfectly natural for said text to at some point become too depressing to mentally support, the entities of untainted reality and unflagging malady then theoretically conjoining themselves to each other. I think this discovery on my part corresponded pretty closely to when I tried to read Les Miserables.

Curse, then, the impetus that told me listening to Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind would be a good idea: what have we in “Superwoman” but a seemingly like-minded vial of the most acute, concentrated misery and heartbreak conceivable to the mind? What makes it even more uncomfortable is that “Superwoman” is actually an eight-minute epic, dichotomously organized between a joyous, hopeful first half and a latter half rife with the incessant plea of “Where were you when I needed you last winter / My dear?” 

I mean, it seems like a foregone conclusion to me that the proper reception of this music, on the part of a critic, would be the objective fact that it’s painfully beautiful, taking the effervescent funk of Sly & the Family Stone and weaving it through this almost impossible tapestry of jazz chords and structural undulations. Indeed, this seems to have no outlandish task for Penny Valentine of Sounds [2], who effused that Music of My Mind was “an album of explosive genius and unshackled self-expression.” 

Yet, from Robert Christgau of Creem we get a modest “B+” rating, and the plaint of the “some of the studio and vocal effects (being) gimmicky and self-indulgent” on the part of Rolling Stone’s Vince Aletti. One nugget from Christgau apparently regarded what was termed “individual songs (that were) not as impressive as the ‘one-man album’ concept,” a pretty cryptic stipulation to begin with even without factoring that it seems to possess the fallacy of comparing a “concept” with a materialized recording of music. 

In the 1980s, another mainstream black musician who got his start in Motown, Michael Jackson, was given the official nickname of “the king of pop,” an artist with less of a proclivity for writing his own songs than Wonder, for that matter. Today, I think, it’s a pretty regular occurrence for a black artist to receive not only critical acclaim but cultural eliteness, ostensibly so, as in the multiplicity of vaunted artists like The Weeknd, Frank Ocean and Kendrick Lamar, the quip of Prince as the best guitarist ever (and whom I’d perhaps replace with Muddy Waters, as a side note), and the tempestuous worship of the track “Purple Rain” on the part of the masses after The Artist’s passing.

You don’t seem to get that with Stevie Wonder in terms of immediately, naturally envisioning him when you think of the 1970s. Indeed, this was a time of Blaxploitation, in film, when Negros were expected to have afros, wear bell-bottoms and, probably, dance, to earn their keep. They were held to a primarily aesthetic standard, in other words, you could probably say. In his article for Rock & Roll Globe “Remembering the Glory Days of MTV News,” Tim Sommer makes a striking set of points that “the labels separated ‘race’ music” and “the Jim Crow line that existed in the music industry between 1933 and 1984 was incredibly pronounced,” going on then to establish MTV as having been ancillary in erasing that exact distinction, to tie to his point. This would mean that, essentially, Stevie Wonder, in his quest of achieving the status as the best musician or songwriter in America, would have been up against a natural color barrier that apparently would have been absent later on in the “classic era” of Michael Jackson and the 1980s.  

Obviously everybody reading this article is more than likely familiar with the adverse circumstances that Stevie Wonder has faced in life, since a very young age. It all adds up, without a doubt, to a pointedly disheartening paradigm, what with the apparent travesty that he very likely did not get the full credit he deserved in his salad days for spearheading and bolstering mainstream American music as he undeniably did. 

Just to foster a sort of nominal theory on why he might have been denied some prestige, anyway, I did have the idea that his origin in Motown, as well as of course his name of “Wonder” which perhaps could have spawned some eye-rolls and accusations of prima donna-ism, might have been working against him. The music of Motown, though often catchy, exciting and becoming, in its own way, tended to be a little thin on subject matter. The average song certainly veered toward romantic themes, as a general rule, with a couple notable exceptions of course being Edwin Starr’s “War” and Junior and the All-Stars’ “Shotgun.” Further along the lines of the idea of Motown being a prepackaged, corporate entity less indicative of the artist’s and man’s true disposition, it was fairly common for the famed singers and groups to be singing songs that were written by someone else. 

Indeed, for Wonder, his “Motown” era and his “classic” era are almost exactly cleaved along the “songwriter” element: the beginning of his era of writing his own songs is marked exactly by a departure from the cutesy, formulaic Motown musical style and toward an approach to song structure much more expansive and original. Through all this, anyway, I can’t help but think that his Motown roots did bite him a little bit in the world of the critics, especially with how arbitrary and even unclear some of their few cursorily explicated discrepancies could evidently be. 

.

[1] In a note below the title is says that this particular edition has been “abridged and translated.” 

.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_My_Mind.