We start with The Cosby Show. Yes, I know, our relationship with that show is very different now from the one we had when first it aired, but this reference is about a fender-bender involving the perennially cool Denise Huxtable and her brother Theo. Turns out the car they hit belongs to Stevie Wonder, and the whole family ends up in the recording studio with him. Even Denise loses her cool around the musical icon.
That episode aired in 1986, and 10-year-old Wesley Morris was watching. What he didn’t know then was all that Stevie Wonder had done for music and for black people in the United States before that Cosby Show moment. The “before that” part is what The Wonder of Stevie is all about.
Morris, who went on to become a New York Times culture critic and hosts this new exploration of a particular musical moment, tells us early on that this entire podcast is about a run of Stevie Wonder albums released between 1972 and 1980 that profoundly altered our musical landscape. It’s a run, says Morris – a man not shy of big statements – “almost universally understood to be the most miraculous, most inspired streak in the history of American popular music”.
As you can tell, Morris is a fan. And he has collected some other high-profile fans for this podcast, among them George Clinton, Jimmy Jam, Janelle Monáe, Questlove, and Michelle and Barack Obama. (Those last three are among the podcast’s producers.) He’s a man of wild enthusiasm, and he’s ready to sell us hard on his read of the importance of Wonder.
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It’s really not that tough a sell, though, given what he’s working with. Over six episodes he takes us from the birth of Stevland Hardaway Judkins – blind because of a complication of his premature arrival, and musically gifted from an early age – through his signing at Motown Records, his early appearances and recordings, and on to his discovery of the synthesiser and to Music of My Mind, the 1972 album that kicked off the run of innovation and elevation on which The Wonder of Stevie hangs.
This full and fervent tale is replete with anecdotes about visits to Playboy Mansion, analysis of Wonder’s album-cover choices and how he embraced signifiers of black culture, historical context as he grappled as an artist with the racist violence being perpetrated on black Americans, and a survey of how he married his musical genius to the moment.
Morris peels back layers on specific tracks, isolating instruments so we can hear and appreciate the building blocks of some of Wonder’s best work and its magic. He holds sacred moments such as seeing the keyboardist Greg Phillinganes re-create a complicated run from the song Contusion, and we all feel blessed. He bares his soul and confesses to crying in a public gym when the song As finally lands its full meaning with him. He offers a groundbreaking interpretation of Superstition that upends one of the most familiar Wonder tunes, at least for this listener. And he makes a strong critical case for including two later albums in that streak of Wonder – Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, from 1979, and Hotter Than July, the 1980s album that ends with Happy Birthday.
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The Wonder of Stevie accomplishes the best of criticism, leading us towards a fuller appreciation of the complexity and marvel of an artist at the apex of his creative life. It also establishes how Stevie Wonder managed to transcend his moment while being rooted in it, the legacy he leaves and why his music still speaks to us some 50 years on.
