(Tamla)
!!! A+ RECORDING !!!
Innervisions, the best long-playing record by very nearly the best recording artist ever to live, is frequently deconstructed as Stevie Wonder's "accident" record, the undiluted celebration of a recovery from a serious brush with death. But of course, its recording and release precede that life-altering event and if the car crash merits a place in a contextual treatment of his music, that place is with Fulfillingness' First Finale and, to a lesser extent, Songs in the Key of Life. Those are Wonder's most mature accomplishments; Innervisions is the moment of fire and will, the furious coming together of everything to form the person, the artist, the cultural titan.
The context it requires has merely to do with the decade of music preceding it: you needn't know where Wonder came from or what Wonder did in the '60s and in Music of My Mind and Talking Book to enjoy and love Innervisions -- but its impact certainly owes something to that advance knowledge, of growing up in real-time under the spotlight. Because Stevie Wonder had recorded brilliant music before, had already asserted himself as a great and nuanced performer of blistering emotion and intelligence as far back as "Castles in the Sand" or earlier -- and there would have been absolutely no reason to think that anyone might feel much need to prove oneself or top oneself after radio classics like "Uptight" and "My Cherie Amour" and "I Was Made to Love Her" that reverberate with red-hot tension and joy even now. He did this on his exceptional LPs of the early '70s, but the two aforementioned might well have begged the same question. There aren't words, then, for what a landmark of individualism and creative transcendence Innervisions would turn out to be. It's without precedent, without peer, without subsequent duplication; the confidence is absolute, the level of artistry still startling.
We must flash forward for a moment, to the third cut on Innervisions, to define the meaning of this specific moment and where it lands. It's not as if the jazz-soul collision of "Too High" or the gloriously sustained "Visions" repeat well-trodden ground for Wonder or anyone else; if anything, they mark the equally pronounced establishment of a distinctive sound only slightly suggested before, manifested in the former's playfully atonal doo-doo-doos as much as the methodical sadness of the latter. But the trajectory of Stevie Wonder's entire career from this point is mapped out in a matter of ten seconds as "Visions" trails off and "Living for the City" picks up. The opening notes dramatically struck on the TONTO synth would be enough for the way they compress the sprawling, dreamlike brood of "Visions" into a sudden kicking in of momentum and rhythm that presses forward, outward, all like a door widening out into the open. But the vocal begins then, and across every song he'd ever laid down, he had never, ever sung like this before.
"A boy is born," he announces, empathy and rage dripping from his voice, "in hard-time Mississippi / Surrounded by a world that ain't so pretty." He's leading us into more than the assured triumph of a true artist and master of pop music; he is lifting the curtain on a ballad of America, a Civil Rights anthem, a keening in the face of darkness. The hot, full-bodied funk that follows features not a single note or sound that isn't played by Wonder himself. He seems to find himself in it, first bursting out vocally like never before and then, after a biting spoken-word vignette about racism and fear in New York, he sings even harder somehow, ragged and loose and violently angry. Across the seven minutes of this stunning single, he finds liberation in directness at last. He finds the same as we segue into the completely different world of "Golden Lady." The aesthetic rules don't correspond here but Wonder ignores that, devoting himself wholly to the gradual build of pure romance in the ballad, as free and in-control as before; his sophisticated, ingeniously modulated vocal achieves the illusion of spontaneity and real, human presence in a sense never achieved by the choirboy recitals in something like "My Cherie Amour," brilliant though he was on it. He has become another figure entirely now; in control of career and music both, he is no Motown idol here.
And what is sung is what matters to him, from the rocks under the feet of the children in "Living for the City," whose pride and sorrow he captures with the wisdom and unfussy reportage of a great journalist -- "her clothes are old, but never are they dirty" -- to the spiritual missive hidden in the outrageous funk "Higher Ground" or the choral, celebratory tones of the absolutely fierce "Jesus Children of America." His lyrics have never been stronger, either; he's at his wittiest, slyest, saddest on "All in Love Is Fair," his most introspective and poetic on "Visions," adding to the sense that what we have here is really simply one of the most extraordinary instances of the last century of a great popular work being a great personal work.
His control gets to you, too; that calm overlording of everything on the catchy sparkle-and-fade "He's Misstra Know It All" but especially "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing," which I'm 90% sure is the greatest song ever each time it comes on, his hapless Woody Allen routine at the outset making it certainly the funniest and most charming. And so much, again, of this is him, purely. He is every note of "Worry" except some of the percussion, and everything including percussion on "Higher Ground," "Jesus Children," "Too High." Does it even register that all of these songs sprang from the same sessions? Is there any doubt that this is one of the greatest albums ever recorded? There is permitted to be slight doubt that it's Wonder's peak, as his next two records would present a formidable challenge, but for consistency I don't feel there's anything close in or out of his catalog. Every cut is a deserved classic, yet you somehow feel compelled to plug them and make people love them more.
If we're talking peaks, though, I somehow keep being sent back to that brief little trill that opens "Living for the City" -- maybe because it signals what's to come (which is certainly why I get goosebumps when "Golden Lady" starts), but I think because it gathers up every impulse of Wonder's prior career and hauls them all to a central, focused point and begins to run. And run he would for years to come.
[SEE ALSO:]
Music of My Mind (1972)
Talking Book (1972)
No comments:
Post a Comment