Stevie Wonder
Innervisions

The path of light music towards its final consecration as art – worthy, that is, of proudly and unapologetically standing alongside the classical music tradition – has been slow, difficult, and fraught with obstacles; the achievement of its deserved podium won with considerable sweat. The debt owed to the “king of rock’n’roll” or the mop-tops from across the Channel can hardly be repaid, this is obvious. However, within this journey, another, albeit quieter, longer, older, and more painful, has in time assumed colossal and indispensable socio-cultural proportions for melodic culture as a whole. Today, in light of countless musical revivals, accustomed as we are to indulging in crossovers, imbued with multiculturalism, and carelessly satisfied with anything that smacks of ‘ethnos’, we have only a vague idea of how bitter and hard the struggle may have been for black music to assert itself on the world stage. Even more so, we often forget about that delicate phase in which many enlightened black artists found themselves fighting an internal battle – a true civil war with their very own tradition – in order to convey a lyrical-melodic message that was both innovative and universal. We are at the turn of the Sixties and Seventies: the fire of the summer of love flares up as quickly as it is extinguished, partly put out by the very characters who had busied themselves with kindling it. Hope and struggle quickly give way to disappointment and bitter reflections. There are those who, despite themselves, being the spokespersons of the revolution, take refuge in an endless quest for inner clarity (Mitchell); those who, from timeless heroes, transform into lonely wanderers in search of an identity that is immediately a name (Crosby); those who feel too intensely the futility of a life that isn’t a scream, an explosion, a contact with the extreme (Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison). Whatever it may be, each one treads the path that the new times impose on them. But black music still had a score to settle before it could afford the “luxury” of such painful awareness: the step to be taken was that of liberation from the constraints to which the music business had bent these artists, with the promise of granting them the place of glory already owed to their white cousins. Without troubling the Davis of “Bitches Brew” – a work whose socio-musical significance far transcends the limits of human reason to be confined within a Christmas tale of “black emancipation” – historically speaking, the first guardian deity of this path goes by the name of Marvin Gaye, who with the amazing “What’s Going On” (1971) – the first concept album on peace – had distanced all black music from the commercial entanglements of Berry Gordon Jr.'s Motown (the home of black artists in the Sixties). However, the chronicle also bears witness to the brief step that will transpire between this watershed event and the definitive explosion, the following year, of another son of the glorious Motown - who will light up the planet with a wonderfully compact album with an inspired title: “Talking Book” (1972). Mr. Stevie Wonder – the youngest but also the most gifted of Gordon’s distinguished firm – already had his cultural revolution in mind, perhaps always; and it was also the simplest one could imagine. His music of the mind would be the mouthpiece of the only truly conceivable universal message, one that begins and ends in the divine word. And his splendid masterpieces of the seventies will always be dedicated to God/Love, from the already mentioned cornerstone “Talking Book” to the mystical ecstasy of “Music Of My Mind” (1972), from the infinite sweetness of “Fulfillingness’ First Finale” (1974) (whose mere “Creepin” could resurrect a corpse) to the later commercial triumphs of the black & white masterpiece “Songs In The Key Of Life” (1976), through the stunning tribute to the Almighty that is “Innervisions” (1973), the all-black masterpiece. It is undoubtedly fitting to pause at these indescribable inner visions unless one has decided to ignore the most complete and perfect piece of the puzzle that makes up the face of an extraordinary artist. Nine tracks that could easily lead their own life if not for the fact that being gathered together they contribute to forming one of the happiest and deepest declarations of love known to popular music. Endless are the facets assumed here by the word love: at times it is elevation to God (“Too High”, with its memorable vocoder experiment in the middle of a funky orgy; “Higher Ground”, a strenuous and tough blues-funk where the redemption message grows ever stronger; the soft melodic sweetness in the concluding, paradisiacal “He’s Misstra Know-it-all”); at times it is love for the woman, religiously sensual (the intriguing crescendo of “Golden Lady”) if not joyfully reassuring (the splendid Latino play of “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing”) or piercing and universal (the yearning “All In Love Is Fair”); at times it is love for one's own people (the immortal anthem to survival in the ghetto “Living For The City”); at times prophetic mystical ecstasy (the enchanting Garden of Eden in “Visions”) or a sermon in defense of young souls (the incredible and unrepeatable gospel of “Jesus Children Of America”). If the greatness of “What’s Going On” is to be found in the magic that holds together a long suite originating from a single, celestial, motif, that of “Innervisions” is – on the contrary – all in the astonishing stylistic heterogeneity of an album that has only one homogeneous thing: the thought – which transcends the senses, while satiating them – of an infinite prayer of gratitude to the One who alone has stood beside a people on the path to liberation. Black celebration.