So here we are out of albums. We discussed music of my mind, talking book, inner visions, fulfilling us. First, finale songs and the key of life. That's the whole streak, 1972 to 1976. So what are we still doing here? Why am I still talking? Aren't we done? We're done, right? I would say no, because there are people out there who are begging to differ. I am begging to differ. Even though conventional wisdom decrees that Stevie Wonder's classic period runs from music of my mind to songs in the key of life, your host, me, is a huge dissenter. There are two more albums. One was a movie soundtrack. The other was a delicious pop album from 1980 called hotter than July. But to make that case, I gotta make the case for the weird album, the outlier, the left turn, the bomb, the turkey, the one that gets invited to the prom, then doused with Pig's blood, the stepchild, the one that's misunderstood. I talked to President Obama about this, the plants thing.

I never, you know, I just couldn't fully get there.

Stick around. I'm gonna make the case.

I know you will.

The plants thing, as the president put it, is Stevie Wonder's journey through the secret life of Plants. It's the first album Stevie releases after songs in the key of life, three years after, in 1979. It's also the soundtrack of a documentary called the secret Life of Plants. Didn't stay in theaters long enough for most people to see it. It's a long movie biz story that's not worth going into now. But the movie itself has its beauty. It uses time lapse photography to dramatize what dynamic, enduring organisms plants are, how complex and interconnected and in sync with the universe they are. There's a lot of blooming and unfurling and swaying, mushrooming. Anyway, when the finished soundtrack came out, people were confused, dismissive. I talked to Robert Kriskow, the writer who folks call the dean of rock criticism. He created the music section of the Village Voice in 1969. Color him unimpressed by Stevie's plants. As far as I'm concerned, the streak doesn't end until 1980 and hotter than July.

Which means that you like the secret life of plants.

Yes, sir. We don't even have to talk about it, but we can.

Well, I will tell you that I did a lot of relistening, and I said to myself, no.

When I talk to the keyboardist, Greg Philm Gaines, a legend who played in Stevie Wonder's band Wonder Love, and on songs in the key of life, he's not surprised by the cold shoulder. Stevie's plants album got. Man, people ain't trying to see a movie about some plants. Come on, man. It's really. Come on. Really? You don't need that explained, do you? Come on. Are you gonna line up to sit in a movie theater to watch a thing about some flowers? Seriously, am I gonna line up to watch a movie about some flowers? Is that the challenge? Greg filling Gaines? Cause if it is challenge, accept it, dude. Because it so happens that every year on April 20, 420, the Alamo Drafthouse plays the secret life of plants. So I walked to my local Alamo in downtown Brooklyn, and that's exactly what I did. I'm about to go see journey through the secret life of plants. I've never seen it before. It's a dream to be able to stand here tonight, punch my ticket, and go watch some plants be stevied. Oh, hey, there. Give a second. I'm Wesley Morris, and I'm working on a podcast about the music in this movie, and I'm just really curious about what made you want to come see journey through secret life of plants.

That's Stevie Wonder did the soundtrack, and that was pretty much all that I needed to know. I did look it up, and all the google search results were pretty obscure, so I'm very excited to venture into the unknown. I've been a fan of the record. I've been listening to vinyl for a long time. Are you high right now? Yes. Maybe a little. All right. This is exciting. I'm excited for you guys. Thank you. Cause y'all don't even know. I know I'm fine. Inside the secret life of fast whoa. Stevie. And a field of sunflowers oh, my God. This is beautiful. Oh, Stevie.

Stevie.

He just walked through the plants. How was it for you?

It paid off.

It was amazing. I'm not sure I really got it, necessarily. Do you think this movie would work were it not for Stevie Wonder's music? I think it would work on a completely different level. It wouldn't work on this. Just anytime Stevie Wonder was singing, it was so beautiful. I was most familiar with the Sarita song at the end. You didn't have the right to go that hard for this film. Everything around this album had been mythic, like finally seeing the show. When you've listened to the soundtrack for 20 years, the movie is kooky and weird and in some parts, kind of bad, but it's also moving. It's vulnerable and innocent. There's a purity about it. And whether you see the movie high or never see it at all, that innocence and wonder are in the music anyway. It's weird and experimental and luscious and doesn't sound like anything else, which is part of why I'm arguing that the streak keeps going. I think its been misunderstood almost as much as I think Stevie Wonders legacy has been misjudged. Well get to that. But first, Im Wesley Morris. Im a critic at the New York Times.

And this, for the final time, is the wonder of Stevie. Okay, before we go any further into these last two albums, its probably useful to get back to where we are in the streak. Just after songs in the key of life. In 1977, Stevie wins album of the year for the third time. But he's not at the ceremony. He's on tour in Lagos, Nigeria. During the broadcast, the producers try to patch him in, but the satellite connection is terrible.

I remember asking him, why did you go to Africa when the Grammys happened? Like in my life, I planned for the Grammys, like back in October.

This is Questlove, host of the Questlove supreme podcast by iHeartland. And he was home watching, baffled.

Like, you released this album on the fourth quarter of 1976, on the same day that earth, Wind and Fire released spirit, and you're the biggest star in the world. Like, somebody had to be upset that you weren't going to be there for this victory lap. And he just explained to me, like, you know, I wanted to be with my people.

Stevie took home four Grammys that night, even though he wasn't there to accept them. And then he took a break. In 1977, the year after songs in the key of life came out, he and his partner, the Tom Yolanda Simmons, had their second child, Keeta Morris, younger brother to Stevie's first daughter, Aisha. Stevie was happy being at home, spending time with his family. But then he got an offer he could not refuse to come up with, music for the secret life of plants. And Stevie uses the offer to take what can only be described as a departure, a very hard left.

Here's the thing. If you're an artist, I believe there is a period that usually happens with your first three records in which you are in the game of creativity, right?

Yeah.

You're in full creative mode. Hopefully with one of those three shots, you'll reach some level of success. And the thing with success is that once you get a taste of success, no matter how much you try to ignore it and say, no matter what, I'm sticking on my creative path. And there's some artists that are very much aware that they've jumped into a lake that might not be easy to get out of. And departure albums usually occur after the biggest album of your career. You best believe in the fall of 1979, where the world is salivating like we are waiting for the Stevie Wonder record. And he released a perfect first single from it. Granted was a ballad like ballads didn't mean much to nine year old me.

Send one. Your love is what you're talking about.

Send one. Yes, send one. Your love.

Sen Juan, your love came out in November 1979. Nobody had really seen this movie. It was never widely released, so nobody really could. And nobody knew what the album was all about either. They just got this drop of this one beautiful ballad, a hint when it's straight from the heart.

It set expectations so high for what was awaiting us. And then we hear it's a double album as well. Yo, when we went to the record store and I grabbed it and I looked at the COVID I was like, okay, this is a weird shade of green. It didn't look like the donuts on the last album cover.

So yeah, this is allegedly the weird one. And I think there was a red line. Generationally, Questlove told me this is the album that put his dad off new albums altogether.

Dad was like, hmm, okay. And so we brought it home and I'll never forget, and I never heard him express any snark or cynicism towards anything. This is the day that my dad retired from music, like collecting music. This is a guy who built a 3000 plus record collection in that household that has essentially educated me and put me in the position I'm in today. By side two, he was just like, nah, man, this is a ripoff.

So what was people's problem? Well, for one thing, it wasn't like the other hit soundtracks for, like John Travolta mega hits like Saturday Night Fever or Grease. It wasn't even like the one for Sparkle or the Wiz. It was way more out there. More out there than a black Motown wizard of Oz with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. It was mostly instrumental and true to the movie's theme, entirely plant based songs from their point of view. Which raises the practical matter of how a blind person writes music for a film. In Stevie's case, a producer on the project described each image to him while an engineer counted off the number of film frames. So his timing was perfect. So maybe he lost the songs in the Kia life crowd, but he blew their kids minds. The hard left kids, at least.

This is the first time I'm witnessing disdain from an adult. But for me, I'm like, this is the most important album ever. That album taught me to dream. That album taught me to fantasize. That album taught me how to vision a future. And there's really no words on it, but just somehow I see it.

Folks like Questlove, of course. Then there's Solange Knowles, who's often cited secret life of plants as the main inspiration for her album when I get home. But also people like Janelle Monae, the musician, actor free ass motherfucker. Those are their words, and I support that. And lover of journey through the secret life of plants.

I feel like someone played it for me in Kansas City. And I was used to all of, obviously, like, the hit songs, you know, sur, duke and fingertips. And so when I listened to this, I was just like, this is not Stevie Wonder. Like, as I know Stevie. Wonderland, the opening song on journey through the secret life of plants, sparked a lot of inspiration for me. And it just, like, I could literally feel weeds clearing out of my mind.

Wow.

Like, I could feel wherever my hair is supposed to grow. Like, I would just imagine that there was plant life coming up out of that.

The opening track that Janelle is referring to, it's called earth's creation. And the openings synths sound primordial, like some ooze that gushed from the ocean onto the shore, grew legs and proceeded to stand up. There are these huge symbols that crash and clang with the bigness of the bang that made the universe. I heard a story that when you were twelve years old, that you basically tried to make a musical based on this album. Is that true?

I did. I think I was in more high school, but, um.

Okay.

Yeah. Cause it was like open music, you know?

Uh huh, uh huh.

So the reason why I was drawn to this concept is because I had written a short story around photosynthesis and around aliens, and aliens coming to abduct everyone that lived on my grandmother's street. And then they left me for some odd reason. Oh, yeah. But they were communicating through the plants. And so that's how I got drawn into secret life of plants, and it made me see myself differently. And what we could do, you know, Stevie and I have the same skin color. When I think about black music, when I think about, you know, me wanting to be an artist, it's like, wow, we can do this, too. We can be this. We can explore the sound of plants. We can listen to the colors in between. We can listen to the sounds that nobody hears but us and push it out, you know, and fully realize an idea. And I think that was, like, really big for me as I started to form who I wanted to be and how I wanted to identify as an artist.

So basically, he gave you a sense of not only musical diversity, but what the strength of a person's catalog could be.

Yeah. Where we could go.

This is Stevie's mo, right? All he's ever really known as an artist has had a be true to himself. I mean, he's still free. But now freedom is a kind of deep spiritual empathy that expresses its humanity through the day to day needs of the Venus flytraps of this world and the gorgeousness of a black orchid. For him, this left turn album, this departure album, is the path of a free spirit.

Freedom is not free. You have to fight for it. You have to fight for the time to execute a vision when nobody understands it. You have to fight sometimes internal battles to just go against the grain and go against what everybody loves you for and say, no, I'm gonna honor my present, not my past. I'm not even gonna be in the future. I'm going to honor right now what is on my spirit and my heart. I think what they missed was Stevie being a free ass motherfucker.

That probably explains why people were so quick to dismiss this album. Plus, there were other new sounds. Some of the big albums of 1979 include the BG Spirits having flown, Donna Summers Bad Girls Perfect album, the Eagles, the long run, the Naxx album with my sharona on it, and Michael Jacksons off the wall albums by artists on fire. But I just want to be clear. Stevie was still on fire, too. Oh, yes. Race babbling. This is the track that ends side two of disk one.

I posed this question on Twitter.

Here's questlove.

Again, I wanted to know from people. I was like, was race babbling really the precursor to house music?

Yes.

Like, the energy. And when I spend it now, especially at venues that want house energy, I spin that record and it works like gangbusters. And when race babbling came on, it felt like futuristic space music. Like, to me, it was like afro futurist, energetic. I don't know.

Like, it's not Studio 54, it's spaceship.

Yeah. I'm thinking the future in space.

This is the end of the disco era that folks like Donna Summer helped invent and perfect. But here's Stevie pushing past disco into the outer limits of what funk promised. Every album in a streak is a statement. There are lots of people who think Stevie Streak starts with where I'm coming from in 1971, that was the beginning of a statement, and there are people like me who think the streak has to include the change up because those albums are statements too. Weird as this album might have been, Stevie got a chance to try out some new tricks, and those tricks changed the path that music was headed down forever. If you don't believe me, ask King Britt, writer, producer, composer, and professor of computer music at UC San Diego.

Secret Life of Plants, man. Like, that was the first time that anyone ever used a sampler on an album. So the first sampler was called the computer music melodeon, and it was invented in Philly at University of Penn. But it was super archaic. Like, it's not like how the samplers are now, but for its time, there was nothing like it. So it was like a hybrid of analog synth and what we call a sampler now, you know, so it had, like a synth, it had an amp, and it had a tape deck. But you could record any sound into the deck and then play it using another keyboard. And so they used that on the whole album. And the song in particular called the first garden, where you hear these birds. Like, he sampled birds and he's playing the birds. Like, it's, you know, like, this is Stevie, like, 79. Like, yo.

I'm gonna interrupt King Britt here and say that we're not talking about using a pre existing song as the basis for something new. Like Owen rappers delight, whose foundation is Sheik's good times, which came out the same year as journey through the secret life of plants. What King Brit's talking about is taking a song or sound and electronically altering it with a machine so you can play it like an instrument. Also, what he's saying Stevie's doing here, it's really innovative. It's also really arduous. You need all this equipment to capture the bird, and then you have to transfer the bird recording into the sampler and hope it was usable. Like, now a sampler's just in your computer.

He'S playing birds, but the way he did it, it's just so ill. Like, the whole album is just ill. But, wow.

This is the kind of reaction to this album that I'm far more used to, what Janelle Monae and Questlove and King Bird are talking about. Maybe it helps to have been a kid or an adolescent who didn't have any preconception of Stevie and were just naive enough to be open to the sophistication of an achievement like this. He was so evidently proud of this thing, too. He toured in support of it. Secret life of plants sounds futuristic and it is. It's another technological breakthrough for Stevie. But Stevie's breaking new ground isn't new. He's always been electronic music's greatest champion.

Looking at Stevie Wonder's electronic music lineage, there are many lines that you can draw back to Stevie.

Here's King Britt again.

First and foremost, Motown was Detroit, Stevie's Detroit. And Stevie opened the door for all black musicians to embrace electronics in their compositions.

And Detroit and Chicago are warehouse started music for warehouse parties featuring new tracks and remixes of hits that enterprising nightlifers threw after these cities wouldn't let black and latin folks open up clubs, and white clubs refused to let black and latin people in. These were gay people, largely. And the pioneers of the genre had a sense of history. They grew up listening to Motown, listening to Stevie.

If we were to look at people today, I mean, the whole lineage of house music, dub, drum and bass, everything, can all go back to Stevie. Stevie's the first to really put it in the context that allowed anyone to kind of enjoy electronics within a pop context. So not just black music, but let's say pop, because a lot of those were pop songs, too.

For a long time, the album's notoriety, as weird, as indulgent, as instrumental, which it only partially is, has overshadowed its ambiance and ingenuity and texture. His departure album was a departure from neither form nor style. Stevie enhanced those. The departure was on us. We departed from him. And that doesnt break a streak. It complicates it. Just a year later, he was back to the old ways, back to a kind of classic form. And all those departed folks that came right on back.

Hey, everybody, Smokey Robinson here. And we're talking about Stevie Wonder. I hope you're enjoying this. I am. That run of albums that Stevie had, you know, he'd go to the Grammys and he'd get semi eight Grammys on the same night. As far as I'm concerned, you know, Stevie is the musical man, and his music has proved that. Stevie Wonder's music covers everything from gospel to blues to jazz, classical, whatever you can think of, you can find some of that element in Stevie Wonder's music. I don't know how music, period, would feel if there was no Stevie wonder. Stevie Wonder has made a tremendous contribution to music around the world, not just here in the United States. His music is internationally profound. This is another thing that I love about Motown, man. We go to places in Europe and all over the world, and we're singing these songs, and probably 60% to 70% of the people in our audience don't even speak English, but they sing those songs and they know them verbatim. Now, Stevie and I have been traveling on the road all over the place, and you might be a person who does that, too.

And your home may be just sitting empty. Why let it be empty when it could be full? Turn it to an Airbnb and earn some money while you're traveling. So if you're curious about this, just go to airbnb.com host and find out more about it.

On September 29, 1980, Motown released Stevie Wonders Hotter than July 10, songs that together aspired a no higher thematic aim than their overall individual excellence. You didn't think I could make a fun album you could listen to in 40 minutes? Well, here I did it. Stevie's sense of short and sweet songcraft is totally back. And in a way, that's another kind of freedom, the freedom to revisit past ideas and past sounds and not feel burdened by it. To hearken back to the past and to reimagine the future. Maybe that was a relief, since the first thing we hear is him letting out a slow motion scream that's like the sound of a singer coming back into our ears. Focus. And he sounds ecstatic to be there and, you know, a little ironically insecure. Did I hear you say you, you love me, Stevie? You know you did. The thing to love about hotter than July, particularly if you're streak oriented, is precisely the way in which it calls back not only to music of my mind but to his Motown years. He even revisits his little Stevie days and records a new version of all I do, a song he wrote at 16 with the mighty Motown composers Clarence Paul and Mars Broadnax.

And I was sung by Tammy Terrell. This is not an artist stalling out. This is somebody closing a circle. It's a return to form. I said it already. Its a return to what he knew worked. And its a reminder to the critics that this isnt a fluke, its a plan. That first statement, free album and streak is itself a statement. Thats what you can hear on hotter than July, the closest hed come to the silliness and looseness of music of my mind, the first album in the streak. And let's be clear, Stevie was returning to a regular Stevie sound with this album. But hotter than July also arrives on the verge of major music irregularity. Disco and punk are morphing into the spikiness and glimmer of what's going to get called new wave. Rappers are going to start on their path to replacing rock stars. And the synthesizer and the drum machine are on their way to the center of pop music. And this album in its diversity of genres, r and b, balladry, funk, country, reggae, it anticipates this evolution in pop, its ten distinct stops on the radio dial. Its possible, of course, that all this innovation, this self discovery through tanto and the dream machine, this completely unique, melody driven approach to songwriting, the sideways philosophy of how a chord can progress, the utterly staggering harmonization of so many musical ideas, jazz, gospel, r and b, rock, classical, salsa, samba, funk, all of that into coherent, exhilarating gemstones.

It's possible that everything there, that masterful synthesis, had helped so radically change what's possible for music and musicians. That Stevie Wonder's own bar had been set so high that he could no longer just leap over it with as much clearance. I mean, he clears the bar on hotter than July, but it also means he has to land. He knew this, I think, because this is his last original album before he puts out a greatest hits album called Original Musicquarium. It's an album that invents a new word and has four brand new songs, four jams. Jams. You know, do I do that girl, frontline, ribbon in the sky. It's an album that highlights the previous ten years, from 72 onward, to say, yo, this is what I pulled off. That's the actual looking back. Not hotter than July, a package celebrating yesterday's achievements with the wisdom of a man who'd made 18 previous albums, two of them doubles, and was about to turn 32 years old. Can you believe that? In that glance, that glance in the rearview mirror, that's what signals the end of the streak. It's also an acknowledgement that by 1982, his own radicalism, the faux coder work, the sampling, the belief in the possibilities of the keyboard were becoming the norm, the standard.

And this blessed, ingenious man was on the verge of putting himself out of business because he was just that innovative. There's also this whole other aspect to his evolution at this point, and it involves another essential, crucial part of the Stevie Wonder experience. And I actually cannot believe we've made it this far without exploring it more than passingly the way we did in episode four, talking about Boogie on reggae woman. I even had a whole conversation about it with Greg Fillingame. So, can I ask a question about the harmonica? Sure. You know, I am very curious to hear you talk about his relationship to that instrument and how it struck you, like, what was he doing that nobody else was doing? What was he bringing into his harmonica playing, and what's your understanding of what it meant when he would decide to incorporate it into a song? Well, that's the second most significant element of his voice other than his voice. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. You know, so when you have something as portable as a harmonica. Yeah, yeah. That you can learn to manipulate, that's gonna be your new best friend. That's a great point.

And over the course of time, he just developed a style of singing through playing that. Yes, he's singing through that harmonica, you know, and it's obviously a very unique sound, and you always know who it is within two notes every time. Every time, it's unmistakable. You hit two notes and you go, oh, it's tv. Arguably, his harmonica playing, his exuberant, life giving harmonica playing on songs like his first hit, fingertips, is what made Stevie a star. And it became such a rich, wide ranging extension of his human voice that it was easy to take for granted. Just a little bit louder. Clap your hands. Just a little bit louder. The harmonica. It's his second voice. And who else in popular music is synonymous with both the clavinet and the harmonica? And one of Stevie's baddest performances with that second voice is on that girl. One of the new songs from musicquarium and one of my personal five most played Stevie Wonder songs. One of my most beloved Stevie Wonder songs. It's actually lots of people's, including Denise Williams, who, as a member of Stevie's band Wonderlove, would have sung all of Stevie's songs, but has a real soft spot for this one.

What about your favorite Stevie Wonder song? That's funny. That girl speak. That girl is my favorite song of his. Okay, why? Because I remember coming into the studio with him and he said, go out there and sing some notes for me.

So I sang some notes, and the.

Next thing I knew, I was in his computer. And when I hear that background, I hear my voice because that's me. Is that you? That's me. And so that's one of my favorite songs.

And the genius behind how he got.

That sound has always stuck with me. Wait, I just want to be clear about, is it the. Is it that. Ah, I'm not. I can't believe I'm making, like, musical sounds to you. But is it that? Is that what we're talking about? It's that. That's you? Yes, yes. Oh, my God, I love the sound of that girl. I do remember way back in episode one where I mentioned that time Denise huxtable crashed her car into Stevie. He invites most of the family to the studio and secretly grabs some audio of her and plays it back. This is what Stevie did to Denise Williams. He captured her singing, put it into his sampler, and uses it for the chorus, which comes right before some of Stevie's mightiest, meatiest tear the roof off. Have a smoke when he's done harmonica work. Stevie's harmonica is his musical passport, and it's been letting him move in and out of all kinds of sonic landscapes since he was twelve, making so many different people's music that much warmer, funkier, stickier. You're listening to the wonder of Stevie from Pineapple Street Studios, higher ground audio and audible. And do you want to hear more?

There's a very special bonus episode only on Audible, featuring me, Wesley Morris, and former president Barack Obama in an enlightening conversation with Stevie Wonder himself. Listen to the bonus episode at Audible before you can hear it anywhere else. Getting bogged down by how much new music there is out there? There's a lot. Consider a daily dose of the all songs considered podcast. It's the easiest way to get tuned into the music world. We spend hours combing through the new music universe, from emerging bands to time tested icons to bring you your next favorite artist. To get up on your music know how. Listen to all songs considered from NPR in the 43 years since hotter than July, our collective sense of Stevie's ingenuity has gotten, I dont know, soft, gauzy, gradually squishier. Stevie is an ambassador of buoyancy and delight. Everybodys favorite uncle Stevie has a meme, this shorthand for joy and a kind of vague, greeting card ish idea of love for millions of people. A huge part of the Stevie wonder experience is the sensation of joy, true, pure happiness. One of Stevie's most beloved songs is called overjoyed. And that's the feeling people get when they see him.

That's the feeling he seems to be experiencing when he's around us. But the thing I'm trying to get at is that something gets lost when we put angels wings on a living artist. Stevie's facility with melody and chord structure, his wizardry with electronic production, his being a one man band, even his message of love, his enduring belief in love as religion, in love as a treaty, in love as medicine. We don't think about that now. We don't think about the sophistication of his love message or the scorn and confrontation and humor in so many of these songs. We all know Stevie Wonder is undeniably wonderful. Theres no question about that. But his ubiquity kind of makes him invisible because hes simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. What im trying to say is, for all that hes been celebrated, I still dont think weve ever really fully appreciated just how revolutionary this man is.

When I was in my teens, there was a lot of radio stations that didn't play Stevie wonder because they were playing Led Zeppelin.

And the idea of playing them both in the same format inconceivable.

Inconceivable.

Yeah. That's Barack Obama again. As someone who's been following Stevie since his childhood and since the beginning of this streak, I wanted to know, what does he think about this ubiquity versus invisibility question does Stevie get all the credit he deserves?

Top 40 wasn't segregated, but people's listening habits were segregated. And so I think that the degree to which they dominated popular culture during these periods wasn't comparable to the white artists, irrespective of their quality.

I think that's absolutely right. I think that just to give you the term that the Beatles, Dylan, Springsteen, Pink Floyd, it's album oriented rock. It's not album oriented r and b. And if we're thinking about the genres as being not so much sonically segregated, but racially segregated, there was no opportunity. To your point, you're the first person to put it this way. And that's kind of a mind expanding concept, which is what we now call deep cuts. Those weren't deep cuts for zeppelin fans, right?

Nope.

You just heard all nine songs on the radio.

Yes. You know, the culture is always trying to distinguish between high art and popular art. And I think that among the gatekeepers, at least, rock and rollers who created these encompassing artistic visions were elevated into high art.

Yes, yes, yes.

Whereas I think black artists, they were producing hits, and those in charge of the canon did not necessarily get it.

Hits versus high art. Who gets to make that call? Well, I mean, people like me, critics. And in the 1970s, when Stevie was at his peak, there were a lot of critics, a lot of rock critics, white rock critics. And those were the guys evaluating Stevie in his career, guys like Robert Kriskow, who we heard at the beginning of.

This episode, when I come in in 74, I really want to be covering as much black music as I can for what's conceived as the Village Voice audience. Well, Stevie Wonder really made that easy.

Chris Gao created the Village Voice music section in 1969. It didn't exist before him. They call him the dean because he ushered in, mentored, hired edited, championed, generations of music critics and writers, whether or not they thought like he did. Now, Chris Gow is generally a Stevie Wonder fan. I want to say more or less, but it's mostly more. He even wrote Stevie's Kennedy center honors introduction. But critics are free to change, sharpen, double down on their feelings, and they should be. Robert Kriscow actually excelled at those kinds of dynamics. Nearly five months after fulfilling this first finale came out, he wrote a piece called Stevie Wonder is a fool. Two years later, after songs in the Key of Life's release, he wrote another review, and it was titled Stevie Wonder is a masterpiece. All of that is to say, Chris Kyle's opinion of Stevie Wonder. I mean, it's complicated.

Basically, what the fool was about was to talk about his ideological naivete, and it was to acknowledge that a lot of the things he said sounded a little foolish and not as well informed as they might be. So, in other words. But I was taking the bull by the horn and saying, yes, only he's also a genius, and here's why. That was a good headline, although I must say, every once in a while I say, why did you have to do that? But I know what is the right thing to do. I. Journalistically, it was. I mean, you know, it caught everyone's attention. And then I wrote this book, very positive piece about him, and I wrote an even more positive piece in the wake of songs in the key of life, and listening back to some of those late albums that people think are terrible, they're not. Some of them are really rather good.

Thank you. I wanted to ask Robert Kriskow about this canon idea, and if he thought, as one of the few people in charge of the canon, forming it, maintaining it, closing and opening its gates, if Stevie got all the recognition he deserved. I think that one of the things, and I think you've talked about this in terms of Stevie Wonder, part of the reason that his canonization process to sort of be equivalent, or even remotely equivalent to what the Beatles get.

You know, what I think I would do here is I would go back to the question of just exactly how world historic his voice itself is. And I would say that the Beatles, as an entity, they are in a different league. And then what do you do about Mick Jagger? I'm sorry, I would think that I say that Mick Jagger is, in the end, a more interesting singer, singer than Stevie Wonder. And now we're getting down into the mortals here, right? The Rolling Stones are a great band, but I don't believe that they belong in the same league as the Beatles, or for that matter, great.

Joni Mitchell, I'm wondering again, because there's such a facility here, right. You really are with Stevie in some ways. Your struggle is never with Stevie. Right. Your struggle is with what kind of pantheon to put him in. Right. Like where alongside these other people to situate him. And in many ways, part of that facility in the writing has to do with a comfort with the degree to which this is black music, essentially. Right. Or there are themes that Stevie's dealing with that involve black people. And I'm wondering partially whether you fell in on that, excluded from it, disqualified to think or write critically about it beyond the music and as you know, black music. Right.

Yeah, sure. I felt that my qualifications were questionable.

But I mean, do you know what I mean? Like, there being some kind of discourse among the critics about. Or were there being less of a contest? Well, I mean, there was music in these.

There was Leroy Jones and Ab Spellman writing about.

But they were mostly thinking about jazz.

Right.

They weren't thinking about jazz. They wrote about pop.

They didn't get it.

Right. Right. I'm thinking purely about pop because nobody wrote about pop.

There was no serious writing about pop at all.

No, no, no. I'm just saying in terms of, like, what was happening with pop music. And I guess, I mean, it's not really worth thinking about much more. But, like, the question of, like, who fell between the cracks, who exactly, in.

Pop music you think shouldn't have fallen between the cracks? When.

I don't. I mean.

I mean, it's easy, you know, the history. Who would it be? Ray Charles. Well, Rachel, I'll take Ray Charles.

Okay. I would take Stevie.

Oh, I think Ray Charles was.

I'm not. This is not a hierarchy. I would. I mean, you've. You've taken Ray. I would take Stevie Wonder. Right. I would say that, you know, Aretha Franklin's amazing grace, for instance, is, I think, one of the greatest recordings ever.

Great majority about that record. And I don't like it.

I know.

I mean, I don't like it because I don't like gospel music.

Right.

And especially, it's in its most grandiose forms. I like it as small group music. Okay, right. But the grandiose stuff. I don't like grandiose. I don't like opera either.

Right. I mean, I think that that is one of the great recordings. But one of the reasons to talk to you was because you were one of the few people to take him seriously at all. How did you feel about the gospel elements of Stevie, though, in that way, did you.

Well, look. Or Aretha Franklin? I mean.

Well, I mean, specifically with Stevie, did you. I mean.

I'm sorry. No, I mean, when Stevie comes up, I don't really know anything about gospel music. I mean, did Steve even go to church? I don't actually.

I don't know what the biographical spent time is. A kid in the church, he wanted to be a preacher for a while. But, I mean, you know, half a Motown song was a gospel song in many ways, right? And the kind that.

Now, I'm sorry. You know, I can say I like these groups, and I do, but I. But I can't make those connections in any kind of a meaningful way.

This is tricky. It's really tricky. I mean, how can you listen to Stevie Wonder and not hear gospel? And, look, the last thing I want to do is discredit Robert Kriskow. He's the dean for a reason. He's made me a better critic and a sharper listener. Plus, he loves hotter than July, so he's aces. In my book, everybody's got things they dislike or don't get. What I'm thinking about is more about the cultural machinery that builds artists legacies. When you're a tastemaker, I mean, a really important part of that machinery, those knowledge gaps, biases, really, they can be consequential. And so this gospel question, it really, really matters. Gospel music is foundational to the black experience, therefore to pop music and therefore to this country. White Americans, I mean, they know about church, but black people, I don't know. I mean, it's our church, our gospel, Stevie's gospel, it's just different. And I'm not saying that everything Robert Kriskow and his peers wrote about Stevie Wonder and any number of black artists during this period, before it and after it, I don't want to say they were wrong, because I don't like that formulation. But if you don't want to hear the gospel in it, there's something you're also neglecting to hear in this music, and it can't be missed.

It's ever present. We know it's there. We hear it because it's ours. Because Stevie Wonder's music is black music. Sure, he was on tour with the Rolling Stones, and the people who give out Grammys love him. He was on Sesame street, for God's sake. The sky's for everybody. But more than anything, it's music about black life with black church roots for black people to love and understand. There's also something important when it comes to how we remember this music and how we appreciate it, that is meaningful. When you think about the fact that the people who kind of put it on the track to permanent greatness and canonization weren't concerned with a significant portion of what that music was trying to say and access and do and who it was trying to reach. And that's something that has been weighing on me for a long time. I didn't need Robert Kriskow to tell it to me. I sensed it. I could read it in the pieces themselves. When I talked to Barack Obama about some of this, he reframed it really well for me.

Look, there's an analog in literature, right? TOni MOrRIson, yes, bluest eye are exceptional works, but it's not really until song of Solomon and then beloved that Toni Morrison is discussed in the same way that a John Cheever, for example, is discussed, despite the fact that those earlier novels by Tony are as good as any novels that I would say better. But that's just my opinion counts for a lot. Yes, because they were treated differently at that time. You know, look at this excellent black female writer.

I was just about to say, you know, to your point, it's because those books are about black people experiencing other black people, right. And they're about a black world that does not involve white people.

Right.

So there's no quote weigh in.

Well, that's exactly right. And I want to pick up on that because I think what I was describing about Stevie is similar to what Tony does in the sense that it's not obsessed with our interactions with the white world. The suggestion is there's a universality and a relevance and a depth in this world that is worthy, just like James Joyce's Dublin is worthy. It takes a while for folks to.

See that, just to set Stevie Wonder aside for a second. This story, this situation, it's old. It's as old as this country. Black people having to try harder, be smarter, more talented, more skilled, just to get somebody to put eyes on them, let alone be recognized, awarded, lionized. And so I'm hung up on this in Stevie Wonder's case, because I want him to have all the recognition imaginable. But I think the problem has been all these years with the people who make these canons and the way they think about the album as an art form in the minds of some of those people, Stevie Wonder makes hits, not high art. He makes songs, not albums. But what about us, all of us over here in Stevie's camp with his art hanging high?

You know how people now be like, you went platinum in my house. It's just like, he was like, diamond in our house. So I didn't know what people were saying about him, you know?

This is the recording artist Mariba. Stevie Wonder has been a part of her musical diet since before she could speak. But beyond that, Stevie's been a beacon and, of course, a kind of blueprint for her approach to music, but also just life.

I met him one night, and it went from just kind of a simple encounter to us sitting at the piano together and playing and singing together. And, you know, I'm telling you about my family, and he loves Ethiopia. He loves ethiopian food. Like, he's speaking Amharic to me. I'm like, okay, this is crazy, you know?

So she played Stevie Simmer music, and he really liked it. He even gave her the push she needed to really put herself out there.

And I was just still just second guessing myself. And he was just like, no, no, no. Just do it yourself. Trust me. Just do it yourself. He said, you're doing yourself a disservice to not answer what God's telling you to do in general, in life.

Mariebes talked to Stevie about his life and his music and what it all means. Because of that, she has a different perspective on how the world sees his music.

I just think in spaces made by white people, designed by white people to celebrate anything, we tend to be an afterthought. And we're literally over here screaming from the mountaintops, like, this shit is genius. This is important, and this is groundbreaking. And it feels like it's always after some white artist has stolen it and repurposed it, that it is like, oh, wow, a black person made it. Okay. Onto the next thing. It's like, to be innovative, in my personal opinion, is almost to not be fully received properly. Bye, white spaces. Like, I take that as a compliment, to be very honest, because I feel like if I'm being celebrated in a moment by spaces that were never designed for my people to get truly free, then I gotta wonder why, you know, why I'm acceptable in those spaces and why they want to celebrate me. So I think that Stevie was absolutely celebrated by the people who needed to hear what he was saying the most, and everybody else caught up. And that's okay.

I hear what Mareeba is saying here. The history of this country doesnt lie on that front. There are too many examples of slights and insulting oversights and questionable, uncomfortable affinities to trust in the music world. The embrace of the establishment. Of course, the establishments enthusiasm wasn't exactly a problem for Stevie. Three of this streak's masterworks innervisions fulfilling this first finale and songs in the key of life. They all won Grammys for album of the year, the industry's top prize. That's something that never happened for some of the seventies most important acts, not for Elton John, Eagles or the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, never even nominated. In one sense, the Grammys weren't cool. They acknowledged a kind of middle of the road ness. But for a white artist, those are omissions that could be refashioned as badges of honor. For a black artist, being voted the best, even by the coot who gave out the Grammys, is a milestone. A white artist might have the luxury of being too cool for school, but for black America, Stevie's acclaim washington a kind of apex. None of us had ever been up there before, and only once during this run was he even ever up against another black artist for that top Grammy.

So it felt like Stevie was standing in for a whole that he was a delegate for all of blackness and all of black music, which isnt fair to Stevie or to the scores of other very different, also great artists who were as contemporary, who were also ignored by the very establishment that awarded Stevie because the establishment happened to choose him. I've got to admit to be the sort of sad person who's really come to understand the power of popular culture myths, in part because I helped take them apart, in part because I helped build them. I'm a critic, and that's part of what I do. But how do I know that the Beatles and Miles Davis and Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, are these titanic, essential artists? Well, I've been told that my entire life, not by my family necessarily, but by these establishments. I didn't get that with Stevie Wonder. There were no specials devoted to how good he was. I didn't experience him ambiently referenced in other people's writing, not nearly as chronically and fanatically as other artists were. I even have a touch of identification with Robert Kriskow. You don't know unless you know.

It's also possible that these slights, they have a way of fulfilling themselves. I was raised in a house where gospel music was a food group. I had the Clark sisters and Andre Crouch and Shirley Caesar. I had Mahalia Jackson and Inez Andrews and Aretha Franklin. But it's possible that I took that music for granted and thought it was uncool. As I got to that age, I had to learn for myself how much at the center of so much american music, gospel music was. I had to be educated. And a lot of the people doing that, educating and evaluating the critics, for example, had never known how valuable this music was. So even though I knew it, it was less valuable to me. This is a long way of saying that maybe we don't value Stevie Wonder enough, in part because we have never been trained to value what he made. It's not good enough that we think a Stevie wonder is great when obviously he's one of the very greatest. Period theres a type of legacy that gets consecrated and proliferated by textbooks and newspapers and magazines and tv interviews, the type thats cemented in star plaques, on walks of fame, in inductions into halls of fame records other people will never touch.

Then theres a different kind of legacy, the legacy thats wrapped up in the fabric of every people's lives. Happy birthday, Doctor King. 40 years ago today, I was marching in the cold and snowy streets of Washington, DC, where thousands of people all believed in the right and the power to convince Congress that this national holiday was needed, not just to honor this man of peace, but to honor the principle of peace and unity. This is the man himself, Stevie Wonder, in a video he put on twitter this year. It was a sort of open letter that he directed to Doctor Martin Luther King, explaining the fight to get Doctor King's civil rights activism commemorated as a holiday, as its own national holy day, the day of Doctor King's birth, January 10. And Stevie helped lead that charge. There was a democratic house, a Republican Senate, and a republican president. We reached across differences, and in August 1983, the bill to make Doctor King's birthday a national holiday passed the democratic House of Representatives 338 to 90. In October 1983, that bill passed the republican Senate 78 to 22, and President Ronald Reagan signed that bill into law on the 2 November 1980.

Even though it wasn't in the picture, we all were there in the Rose Garden. He means he wasn't in the literal photograph taken at the signing, but the song he wrote to establish Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday. That was the capstone of his activism. And it wasn't too fancy either. He called it happy birthday. Symbols are a tricky thing. They only have as much meaning as we give them. Because of that, what can seem trivial to one person can be so important to somebody else. It can make you feel like you're fighting for the most important thing in the world and for crumbs at the same time. Their meaning can also become invisible to you through time, becoming just a motion or a thing or a song. The last track on Harv in July is that motion, that song activism, that becomes anthem and anthem that becomes part of people's everyday lives. Black people have two national anthems, lift every voice and sing. And then there's this. Stevie Wonder's version of Happy Birthday. At any black american's birthday, the following ritual happens. A cake appears, candles are lit. The original, boring version of Happy Birthday gets sung.

People finish, they look at each other, and then they start singing. The one that Stevie wrote for doctor Martin Luther King. Folks clap on the two and the four and celebrate the passing of another year of life. And if you're lucky, they do the whole freaking song. And I'm sure you would agree, what could fit more perfectly than to have a world party on the day you came to me? Happy birthday to you happy birthday to you happy birthday, happy birthday to you. It's the black birthday song for sure. That's Michelle Obama, and she's got her plate in one hand and her birthday hat on her head, so she, too, is waiting for the beat to drop. I don't remember the first time when it became about more than just Martin Luther King and the celebration of his birthday, when it just became about the celebration of us and our aging processes, a community as a people. It jumped from this one political purpose to the broader thing that it is for us now. This is the song of all of our lives, the way we celebrate all of our coming of age. And, you know, and leave it to Stevie to understand that this song could become that.

I don't know that that was his intent when he wrote it, outside of getting the holiday locked in, but, whoa, it's all of our birthday songs now. And I think, in a weird way, isn't that the mlkst thing ever? Yes, that is the mlkst thing ever. This, of course, is a curious power of this song, the way it equates this man of the people with the people themselves. Stevie wrote it to urge the government to make the commemoration of King's birthday a national holiday. But anybody using this happy birthday on your granny, on your bestie is commemorating that you, black person, made it another year in this country. Nobody really thinks about this, but that's what's happening. Somebody sent me a TikTok video not too long ago, and you know how these things are usually. It's short, and I don't exactly know what I was watching for. It's of a little boy. He's maybe five. His hair is in four braids. He's got a pair of black and white nikes, and they match his jeans and his black shirt. He's the only visible person in the shot, but you can hear off screen his teachers and all his classmates celebrating this special day.

It is. And he's looking around and smiling, patient, but clearly waiting for something else. And when the class finishes the song, this little boy is confused. Wait, did we get the, like the baby one? The what one?

When I said, how old are you?

Now the teacher tries to guess, what do you mean by the singing one? He means this. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you happy birthday, happy birthday. I'm watching this kids confusion and how he knows something is off, how that something happens to be the absence of Stevie. And something's occurring to me this entire show. Every person I've spoken to for it and everybody I've spoken to in my life who loves Stevie Wonder fell in love at this very crucial moment in their development when they were young. It's funny because this is music that's always felt grown up to me wise, but it was written and recorded by a young man who started writing and performing and recording as a child. Adults got Stevie, but the Stevie we got as children really sticks with us. The complexity of innocence and loss and disillusionment and hope, that sense of adventure. Children could hear that this music was sophisticated. So maybe it's not cool, but it's true. It's pure. It was hours before we knew what the world was. It worked, what it sounded like. Hes Stevie Wonder, obviously, but for so many of us, he was very simply wonder.

And lots of us are holding on to that. We are passing it down, that little boys confusion at not hearing Stevie wonder on his birthday is the definition of legacy. The canon is streaks and charts issues. It shows like this one, but the canon is also this kid in 2023, knowing what the real happy birthday is, the canon is us. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. This has been a higher ground than audible original the wonder of Stevie is produced by Pineapple Street Studios, higher ground audio and audible. Our senior producer is Josh Gwynne. Producer is Janelle Anderson. Associate producer is Mary Alexa Cavanaugh. Senior managing producer is Asha Saluja. Executive editor is Joel Lovell. Archival producer is Justine Dom. Fact Checker is Jane Drinkard. Head of sound and engineering is Raj Makijae. Senior audio engineers are Davey Sumner, Pedro Alvira and Marina Paez. Assistant audio engineers are Jade Brooks and Sharon Bardalas. Mixed and mastered by Davey Sumner and Raj Makhija. Additional engineering by Jason Richards, Scott Gilman, Javier Martinez and Leanne Doe. Score and sound design by Josh Gwinn and Raj Makija. Original score performed by Carles Music and Raj Makhija.

Additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. Our choir was voiced by Keisha Chantrell, Christine Noel, Carlos Abraham and Jamal Moore. Directed and arranged by Jarrett Jenkins. Produced by Raj Makija and Josh Gwynn. Special thanks to Ronnie Ohanon and Javon Haskin at Greylock Agency and Scylla Gospel Choir. Horns by Sunday by Od Emmanuel and Luis Allen hosted in an executive produced by Wesley Morris. Higher ground executive producers are Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Corinne Gilliard Fisher, Dan Fierman, and Mukta Mohan. Creative executive for higher ground is Janae Marable. Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Genoi Sperman and Max Lynske. Audible executive producers are Kate Navin and Nick Dangelo. The wonder of Stevie is also executive produced by Amiritehe, Questlove Thompson, Anna Holmes and Stevie Wonder. Questlove is a producer of this show courtesy of I Heart and can also be heard on Questlove supreme from I Heart podcasts recorded at different fir patches, the hobby Shop in Pineapple street studios. Head of creative development at Audible is Kate Navin. Chief content officer is Rachel Guaca. Copyright 2024 by Higher Grade Ground Audio, LLC. Sound Recording Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday close.