Stevie Wonder Finds Fulfillingness

Village Voice Album Review, Explained. 1974

This was the first assignment I did for Robert Christgau when he became editor of Riffs, the music section for the Village Voice. (I had started writing for the Voice when I was still in college in Boulder in 1971 and 1972) when arts editor Annie Fisher picked a few reviews (Reverend Ike on TV, a T-Rex album review) out of the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts, for which I will always be grateful.

And by 1974, the music section under

Robert Christgau

was a very big deal. The arts section of the Voice, along with its sustaining advertising and listings for every club or concert, movie, art, or off-Broadway theater production, made it must-reading for my generation.

As I wrote in my celebration of Christgau's 80th birthday nearly two years ago, I nearly choked on this review of "Fulfillingness First Finale." It was a major record, an important assignment: I was too tense, more focused on zingy one-liners than actually appreciating the album, which in retrospect (having played it through again today), was an outstanding mixed bag, a bit inconsistent, and not easy to pin down. I couldn't find a proper lede for the review until I returned home to West 22nd Street west of Ninth Avenue, then the rough hinterlands of Manhattan's Chelsea. I was having breakfast at a diner, reading the Daily News. The radio was playing a then ubiquitious commercial for a New York City appliance chain, JGE, that would begin with a Brooklyn-accented voice: "What's the story, Jerry?" The lightbulb went off. I borrowed a pencil, wrote down, "What's the story, Stevie," then went home and wrote my review.

This phase of Stevie Wonder's career, especially including Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973)  Fulfillingness (1974) and the double-album Songs in the Key of Life (1976), was the peak of pop music's "monoculture," (also a RC coinage, I think): A time when there was universal agreement among lovers of all kinds of popular music, music critics, and the music industry establishment that Stevie Wonder was making the best music of its time: Innervisions, Fulfillingness, and Songs were each Grammy Album of the Year winners.

Re-reading the original Voice review, I'm still mildly embarrassed (and a little proud) of the audacity to describe what I thought Wonder was saying about black America, and what its roots were. Some of my assertions would never pass muster today. It’s too smartass by half: What was my singer-songwriter obsession about? Stevie Wonder crossed over on his own terms. There were omissions: for example, failing to mention Wonder's co-producers, Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, the synthesizer wizards who had opened up a universe of sound so that Stevie Wonder could be an orchestra of his own in the studio. (Corrected now in the text.) And I was clueless about the spirituality emanating from Wonder's invocation of god, or G-d, on the album, not understanding the complete connection between the black church and political activism. But we were encouraged to write with nerve: It was good practice, and a great way to grow up in public. Today, my college students think of Stevie Wonder as a purveyor of "wedding songs," such as "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" and "Isn't She Lovely." He was that, but so very much more, perhaps never more so than on Fulfillingness. I have rewritten some of this and still probably got stuff wrong.

Stevie Wonder sells God with all the assurance of "Wutzdestoree Jerry" selling appliances. In different hands, say John Denver's or Elton John's, that would be a dangerous enthusiasm. But the God Wonder sings about isn't that of some Tulsa television personality, and his Jesus children of America are at least ten zillion light years away from the methedrine cross borne by the Jesus freaks.

Stevie's impulse is to express his spiritual consciousness through melody and rhythm. You can call it what you want, even rock the boat with it. That it works at all is no small accomplishment for a guy who started out as a child star rhythm & blues singles artist but didn't hit his creative and commercial peak until like Denver, the former folkie, or Elton John the misplaced rocker, he joined the singer-songwriter movement.

He also became emancipated from the control of Berry Gordy Jr., who never understood that it ain't no good to put out albums with two hits and 10 tracks of filler. Stevie Wonder, like James Taylor and Cat Stevens or Neil Young, saw the future with  the 1971 album Music of My Mind. An understated production, soothing melodically and lyrically, reflected personal, romantic values in the course of an album that had to hang together as a singular work, not just a collection of unrelated tunes. The music wasn't formula Motown, it wasn't even overtly dedicated to any kind of r&b or crossover soul aimed at "The Sound of Young America," the erstwhile Motown slogan. By ignoring the adage that "no man is an orchestra," Wonder played virtually all of the instruments on every track. By relying mostly on early Arp and Moog synthesizers [the vision of his co-producers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff], the album had a "contemporary feel."

Motown, which had refused to bankroll Music of My Mind, welcomed Stevie back when it turned out to be his biggest charting album (No, 21, Billboard albums) since his 1963 debut album, "Little Stevie Wonder:12 Year Old Genius" on the strength of the greatest live single ever planted on God's green Earth: "Fingerprints: Part 2."

Motown did what it could to keep its 21 year old genius happy. It offered an unprecedented artistic freedom, and pulled the once reluctant Motown (Stevie Wonder recorded for the Tamla subsidiary, a familiar trick in the post-payola 1960s spreading artists around different imprints [Gordy was another] so that it didn't seem that radio stations were favoring one label at the expense of others.

The laid-back flavor was more palatable coming from Wonder than his white counterparts. The solid ground in rhythm & blues helped: Music of My Mind didn't abandon the form, it simply disguised it. Not the great ballad singer in the past (he had neither the finesse of Marvin Gaye nor the depth of Smokey Robinson, Wonder did have a persuasive touch with light material like "My Cherie Amour." Stevie had even recorded "Blowin' in the Wind" as a pop ballad years before Bryan Ferry discovered that "A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall" was the secret flip side of "It's My Party."

Stevie won over the rest of the doubters with "Superstition, his best hard rock song, which gave vigor to the sometimes soporific Talking Book album. By 1971 and Innervisions, Wonder had taken over the radio, the discos, and the Grammy awards. His sincerity had such appeal that only a handful of artists (again, John Denver or Elton John) could match his sales power. Fulfillngness First Finale shipped with almost $2 million worth of orders.

The new album at first appears to lack the bold dynamics and jagged edges of Innervisions. The initial assumption is that Wonder had been "John Wesley Harding"-ed into mellowness from the North Carolina highway accident that left him in a coma for four days in 1973, while Innervisions was on the charts. While the insights of a song like "Heaven is 10 Zillion Light Years from Home" may have been intensified by the trauma of the accident, there is really no departure from the style and content of the last three albums. Except for one thing: Even the songs that appear to be easy listening become a triumph of taste, maurity and craft.

But Stevie hasn't forgotten how to shake it. "You Haven't Done Nothin'" which rocks like "Superstition" and prophecies like "Gates of Eden" has a specific urgency. Wonder appears to be encouraging a rite of passage into higher consciousness for the Jackson 5, who sing background, as he urges them to "sing it loud for your people."

"Boogie on Reggae Woman," is sweet, silly, and sexy, and here is Stevie's "vision" thing that he loves to tease with: "I'd like to see you in the raw/Under the stars above." Though it bears only a slightly resemblance to the Jamaican rhythm of the title, the song moves like a disco on wheels, a Detroit reggae. The real prize here is Stevie's singing: He slurs with word "reggae" in a way that defies mimicry, dropping the middle “gg’s” so it sounds like he’s saying “‘ra-y,”some primal source rooted in Bob Marley's vision of Haile Selassie's Ethiopia as the motherland.

Wonder also touches on a variety of other styles: "Bird of Beauty" has a Brazilian feel, "Black Orpheus" meets Sergio Mendes. "Too Shy to Say" is this year's "All in Love is Fair," an innocent but compelling pop ballad. The finale, "Please Don't Go," sounds like a made-for-a-Live at the Apollo showstopper. It builds slowly  and ends in shouts of "don't get on that A-train," in the direct contradiction of the instructions of Billy Strayhorn to "Take the 'A' Train."

The musical potency of "Fulfillingness" gives Wonder an advantage over other singer-songwriters, making it possible to ignore the lyric content entirely, when Stevie gets too schmaltzy. Some of the lyrics: "Heaven is 10 Zillion Light Years Away" are as unimaginative as they are sincere, as is the bold and clear statement "Why must my color black make me a lesser man" might have undermined a lesser melody. Yet Curtis Mayfield does this often, to no ill effect, so why not, Stevie?

That the awkward moments occur in the most message-oriented songs, however, indicates that Wonder's passion for proselytizing may have peaked, and that "Fulfillingness" may make a finale to his latest creative phase. [Wrong: Songs in the Key of Life sold about 14 million]. This may disappoint those who've become accustomed to an annual fix of love-and-peace, but it really means that Stevie's smart enough to avoid a sequel that could have been his "Kilimanjaro Mountain High." The restraint could entice us to renew our subscription to the resurrection.

An earlier version misstated when Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross left Motown. It was after Wonder’s emancipation: According to Motown historian Adam White, they both left in 1981.