in his musings on the Television album, disdainty commented on how he can hear the egos on a led zeppelin album. i think the motherfucker is mad projecting some childhood issues or something (did john bonham beat you up and steal your lunch money prior to choking to death on his own vomit?), 'cause i can't hear that when i listen to zep.
the point here, though (other than getting in a good dig) is that innervisions immediately struck me as being completely void of any ego or self-consciousness whatsoever. the voice of the entire album is very clean, with many of the songs simple observations about things stevie has seen and people he has met. even when being judgmental (misstra know it all), he seems like he's not really putting someone down, just saying something that everybody knows. this whole album is just a great, natural reflection of very specific place and time, yet it seems to achieve a little bit of timelessness despite its "current" nature.
of course, that time and place is NYC in the 70's...and it's not just the place but the narrative voice describing it. it's like a guy who used to be poor and black, looking down at the city, very concerned but somewhat disassociated. it's this disassociation that makes the little "play" in Living for the City so good. it strikes me as being sympathetic towards the victim, but not 100%. still, the "nigger" really bites. i know it's a cliche to say, but we live in a world where saying "nigger" can kill a white man's career (michael richards) or make a black man's career (chappelle, rock). it's either a faux pas or a punch line, but it doesn't really hurt. hearing it on this record, though, hurts.
ultimately, then, i guess what struck me most about this record is the drama of it. with the recent spate of broadway musicals slapping a plot on some classic music, i'm a little surprised (and i guess relieved) nobody's taken innervisions and fleshed out the strong narrative that's already there.
i should also say that, you know, the music doesn't really do it for me all the way through. i know that it's great music...it strikes me as being very pure, like stevie wonder was less a songwriter and more a conduit for this awesome ear electricity to just flow out from.
still, it reminds me of lounge cliches, elevators and sesame street. i know that makes me an idiot, but that's a very real part of my reaction. so much of it is just so damn "smooth." i'd love for sgt. phanto to discuss what musical conventions make that "easy like sunday morning" feeling.
now don't get me wrong, i enjoyed the album a lot. "all is fair in love" is fantastic...i can't believe i'd never heard it before. "higher ground" still feels fresh. and i'm constantly pleased by the SOUND of all these 70's albums. great production, but it never gets in the way. every song is just a bunch of people actually playing!
but i just can't help but hear the music and the production values at times and connect it to music that i hate, which is a strange reaction when listening to something you enjoy. does that make sense?
i really dont know much about this album and i havent heard it in years. and i only have 2 other stevie records. but man, what a great keyboard album. i love how stevie can be both soulful and jazzy, and still write songs with great appeal. and yeah his voice is very pure and great. he's an amazing singer. he plays a lot of the instruments on the tracks himself...he really was an amazing musician.
maybe i'm just really hyper in general, but i did find this album to be a little on the 'boring' side. i'm sure if i was in the right mood it would be perfect, but this album doesnt really pull me into itself. i have to want to listen to it. some of his earlier stuff, on the other hand, is just so bursting with his 'pure' energy, it appeals to me a little more.
to say that an album called "innvervisions" is void of ego or self-consciousness is just stupid. stevie wrote all the songs, and basically played all the instruments. this was his idea, his soul, his vision, to more of an extent, really, than any soul album up to that point [that i know of, at least]. this album was nothing but self-consciousness, or at least that was his aim. granted, he tries to pass himself off as innocent, pure and honest, while led zep tries to pass themselves off as gods. huge difference, but still very self conscious.
DD, you must be drunk...or at least DRUNK ON THE POWER OF THE INTERNET!!!
you certainly hear these artists through a much different filter than i do. i can't hear stevie trying to pass himself off as pure, honest and innocent. first track, he's doing bumps with a girl. higher ground, he's telling soldiers to keep on killing, 'cause that's just the way the world works. and on many of the tracks, i get the feeling that he's speaking from a position of having been not at all perfect. not self-loathing guilt, just perspective from experience.
as for the title, i'll ask you to think about what it means in the context of the album. this is not an introspective album at all, but an outro-spective album. he's describing the world as he "sees" it. and of course, he sees things through sound. all of these visions of orange and green and tangerine and gazing into women's eyes are things he has observed, but can only see internally.
feel free to respond when you have something not completely wrong to say about this album :P
"too high" isn't about doing bumps, it's a cautionary tale.
"higher ground" isn't about telling soldiers to keep warring, it's telling the listener to accept the way the world is and yet rise above it all, to be transcendent and be closer to god.
"misstra know it all" is -- i have to imagine -- about nixon.
many say the album is mostly about the black experience and a message to blacks (avoiding drugs, don't listen to the lies (jesus children), be better than the streets, keep living), but personally, i feel like this album is about being blind :P it's in a few of the songs rather explicitly: "i want to hold your hand / hands can understand".
the album is not egotistical. it's not turned inward at all. look at the album cover and you'll see -- this is about how stevie manages to see the world, not himself.
it was a long time before i was able to listen to stevie without hearing the sesame street cheesiness. it's the lord of the rings problem, where now, after it's been abused and imitated endlessly, the original is corny. but it was also the first, the prime mover. stevie was the first black guy who really embraced technology and used all these early synths which now sound kind of silly but which at the time were really sparkling and fresh. whereas tolkien was the first to write about elf-fucking.
i had no idea stevie was playing all these instruments himself. i knew he composed and produced a lot of his own stuff, but he played ALL of it? that's just rad.
and yeah i wasn't trying to say higher ground is pro-war, just not "innocent," but rather a bit detached and realistic. i feel like this whole album is a big departure from his younger, motown stuff that maybe i'm a little more familiar with. if anything, this album seems a bit skeptical to me...skeptical about brothers who ask for favors, skeptical about big talkers, skeptical about the system, skeptical about love.
but wonder balances out these skeptical, cautionary tales with joyous, vibrant, innocent-sounding music and straight-forward emotions. that's how i hear it anyway, as too thematically complex (or at least thematically contrasting) to be labeled outright "innocent" or "skeptical"
glad to know i'm not the only one who associates this music with sesame street. also glad to know i'm not the only one preoccupied with elf-fucking.
apparently, my words were twisted. i never said that this album was inward looking. i said it was self-conscious, and yeah, musically its nothing but. not a wasted note on here, tonnns of chord changes. almost all instruments played by stevie. but i actually do think that in a way, its much more inward looking than his other stuff. mainly in the sense that he's expressing more honesty in how he views the world. this is not an album thats 3/4 full of love songs. this is an album of stevie being honest with himself and how he views the world, and conveying this in a preachy manner. at this point in his career he was his own man and had complete creative control. he had the freedom to express whatever he wanted, and he chose his social consciousness of the world around him. oh and he knew what was going on, too, and wants you to know that - "i'm not one who makes believe, i know the leaves are green. they only change to brown when autumn comes around" he sings in 'Visions.' he knows how the world works. sarge, i can def see how this album is a message to blacks.
and i dont think its skeptical at all. its preachy. because ultimately, he's optimistic - "gonna keep on trying, till i reach my highest ground."
the track 'visions,' is by far the most inward looking track on here, and gives a glimpse into his dream - "people hand in hand, have i lived to see the milk and honey land? where hate's a dream and love forever stands" then he asks if this is real or if its a vision in his mind. this is his 'innervision,', social equality is his utopian dream. he knows how hard it will be, and his choice of music for this track makes it just seem dauntingly hard. hell, he could even be marxist. putting heroin on the same level as religion in 'jesus children' kinda brings to mind marx's phrase 'religion is the opiate of the masses.' yes, his innervision is a social one. but its his vision, and he's finally able to express that and not be tied down by love songs. thats why i think this album is self-aware. because self awareness and social awareness are very intertwined.
i also claim that stevie's music is honest, pure and innocent. i never said he was naive, which often times is confused with innocence. innocence and purity are far too ingrained in his voice for any lyrics to change that. it'd be like mc hammer trying to sound gangsta.
eh but i still dont understand this album. i still need to give it more time, esp with the lyrics.
D just wrote all the stuff i decided i didn't need to get to. i have to say, that was incredible.
those lyrics in visions EXACTLY are about him telling people that just because he's blind, he's no idiot. he uses the imagery of green and brown and leaves, specifically because this is the sort of thing you can imagine someone saying to him "how could you understand, you don't even understand the passing of the seasons, you don't even know color". and here he comes back insisting that he understands, in his own way.
i was similarly going to cite that "milk and honey land" line as evidence of him looking for a utopia he privately suspects cannot come about. but as a blind man, with what we must only imagine is an inner world far beyond our understanding, it seems probable that he lives there in a realm of his own devising, where what to us is a daydream of peace, is to him a very real separate reality.
i admit i must have misinterpreted what you said earlier! it seems we are on the same page.
my late college roommate turned me on to stevie. he had a boombox on a high shelf above his bed in our room in burton hall, and he single handedly introduced me to stevie wonder, dr dre, snoop dogg, john coltrane, art blakey, hank mobley and warren g. he was the first person i ever knew to influence me musically.
he was the whitest dude you ever met, a rich kid from jersey, but he walked around with a malcom "X" baseball cap, simply because it was the only cap the store had that fit him, and did so without any shred of self-consciousness or awkwardness. it just didn't matter to him.
he knew i was a classical snob, and he insisted that i give stevie a chance even though i hated it at first, and before i knew it, i was standing on his bed, reaching high to put on stevie CD after CD, and i couldn't get enough of it. it became the de facto soundtrack to everything that happened in that room. soon, many in our group of friends were listening to stevie. when the kid died, we were all devastated obviously, but we were quick to admit to each other that as awful as it was to lose him, it was only slightly less awful that we would never be able to listen to stevie with the same happiness ever again.
http://cuby.us/misc/nick_shannon_elissa.png
don't mean to be too personal, but i simply cannot talk about stevie without a mention of nick -- one does not exist for me without the other. it's very, very literally the one thing in life about which i am completely inconsolable.
also sarge, might i mention, sun ra was experimenting with keyboards as far back as the 60s. granted it was free jazz and didnt have as much popular appeal as stevie, but i just thought i'd note that. sun ra even has an album from 78 that was recorded in 70, where one entire side is just him on the mini moog. its awesome, too.
by the way, i love your critique of this one, sarge. you really do know this album like the back of your hand, and i am eagerly awaiting the next "back of sarge's hand" alert.
So i've been trying to find a way to jump into this project. And this is the first album you guys have looked at that I'm actually somewhat familiar with. I don't really know where to begin (except to say that this little comment box doesn't permit moving the cursor with arrow keys or pasting text in, which terrifies me).
You have all done a wonderful job critiquing this album. When engaging with something filtered down not only through the years, but also our personal experiences of an artist, his later work, and the person he gradually and continually became, it is quite difficult to engage with the product in question without introducing all these other contingencies. We are constantly and unavoidably influenced by our experiences. Yet despite that I feel you've done an excellent job of communicating your bare experiences.
I have little patience for social commentary and critique as pertains to art. It's not because I don't believe any such messages can be extracted from a work ("living for the city" is quite clearly an indictment of racism and the harsh socio-economic conditions of urban life, especially for poor black people). Rather, I feel such descriptions of art are transparent and often simply obvious. They are too easy. Good art should compel us to go beyond what is facile and tedious, to move past and through anything that is easily within reach. We can't be lazy. We have to take something as miraculous as this album and force it to create something inside us that transfigures our point of view. Not just our perspective, but who we see and understand ourselves to be.
It might seem I'm asking a lot of art, but why not? Too often I sit and engage with in a purely emotive sense. I look for individual tracks that register specific emotions in me. Sometimes I want to be cheered up, or brought down. Sometimes I want to be reminded of some nostalgic thing. I feel these expectations have been bred in me by years of exposure to a culture that does not fundamentally challenge art, or that expects art to challenge us back.
When sgt. phanto wrote that Stevie Wonder sees "as a blind man, with what we must only imagine is an inner world far beyond our understanding", I felt struck by the statement. I am compelled to respond. Now I understand that sgt. phanto doesn't mean that Stevie Wonder simply experiences more than we do (which would be easy enough to say, since we now have a politically correct climate that tends to attribute special uniqueness to those with disabilities -- nor am I here saying that's a bad thing to do, but I digress). Really, what strikes me about the comment is the marked /difference/ of Stevie Wonder's experience of the world.
I take it from you (who know the particulars far better than I do) that it is an undeniable fact that he wrote and composed and played most of the material on this album. Aside from being an incredible technical achievement, this affords us a profound opportunity to engage with a rare and beautiful paradox: the sensory and aesthetic encounter with profound difference. None of us (I am assuming) are blind, but we can here experience blindness transmuted through song. I find that fact alone to be breathtaking, and one that overrides any residual cheese that Stevie has accumulated by the trespass of years.
i believe that art is especially useful as a descriptive conduit to the experience of truly different people. we're talking about a guy blind from birth, living entirely in the dark -- what a different way to live life on this earth. and we learn more about stevie's darkness from his art than we could from any reply he could give to the question "what's it like to be blind". stevie doesn't know what it's like to be blind, since he doesn't know what it's like to NOT be blind, so he cannot answer that question. his music, however, describes his world, and we can thereby gain some understanding.
for instance, you can listen to people with a mental disorder describe their inner world through words, but could it possibly be made more palpable than through their art? http://tinyurl.com/yzkaysm
ps you can solve the no-copy/arrow key bug by logging in with a blogger username i believe.
pitchfork's top 100 of the 70's + top 100 of the 80's, considered, scrutinized, explored, assailed, defended, appreciated and deprecated, fussed over, held up high, kicked to the curb and held back up again. education by fire and a middle finger to disdain. tea, anyone?
BACK OF HAND alert -- every note, every word.
ReplyDeletein his musings on the Television album, disdainty commented on how he can hear the egos on a led zeppelin album. i think the motherfucker is mad projecting some childhood issues or something (did john bonham beat you up and steal your lunch money prior to choking to death on his own vomit?), 'cause i can't hear that when i listen to zep.
ReplyDeletethe point here, though (other than getting in a good dig) is that innervisions immediately struck me as being completely void of any ego or self-consciousness whatsoever. the voice of the entire album is very clean, with many of the songs simple observations about things stevie has seen and people he has met. even when being judgmental (misstra know it all), he seems like he's not really putting someone down, just saying something that everybody knows. this whole album is just a great, natural reflection of very specific place and time, yet it seems to achieve a little bit of timelessness despite its "current" nature.
of course, that time and place is NYC in the 70's...and it's not just the place but the narrative voice describing it. it's like a guy who used to be poor and black, looking down at the city, very concerned but somewhat disassociated. it's this disassociation that makes the little "play" in Living for the City so good. it strikes me as being sympathetic towards the victim, but not 100%. still, the "nigger" really bites. i know it's a cliche to say, but we live in a world where saying "nigger" can kill a white man's career (michael richards) or make a black man's career (chappelle, rock). it's either a faux pas or a punch line, but it doesn't really hurt. hearing it on this record, though, hurts.
ultimately, then, i guess what struck me most about this record is the drama of it. with the recent spate of broadway musicals slapping a plot on some classic music, i'm a little surprised (and i guess relieved) nobody's taken innervisions and fleshed out the strong narrative that's already there.
i should also say that, you know, the music doesn't really do it for me all the way through. i know that it's great music...it strikes me as being very pure, like stevie wonder was less a songwriter and more a conduit for this awesome ear electricity to just flow out from.
ReplyDeletestill, it reminds me of lounge cliches, elevators and sesame street. i know that makes me an idiot, but that's a very real part of my reaction. so much of it is just so damn "smooth." i'd love for sgt. phanto to discuss what musical conventions make that "easy like sunday morning" feeling.
now don't get me wrong, i enjoyed the album a lot. "all is fair in love" is fantastic...i can't believe i'd never heard it before. "higher ground" still feels fresh. and i'm constantly pleased by the SOUND of all these 70's albums. great production, but it never gets in the way. every song is just a bunch of people actually playing!
but i just can't help but hear the music and the production values at times and connect it to music that i hate, which is a strange reaction when listening to something you enjoy. does that make sense?
"every song is just a bunch of people actually playing!"
ReplyDeletenope, it's all stevie. even the drums.
"simple observations about things stevie has seen"
you talkin about stevie wonder? ;)
i really dont know much about this album and i havent heard it in years. and i only have 2 other stevie records. but man, what a great keyboard album. i love how stevie can be both soulful and jazzy, and still write songs with great appeal. and yeah his voice is very pure and great. he's an amazing singer. he plays a lot of the instruments on the tracks himself...he really was an amazing musician.
ReplyDeletemaybe i'm just really hyper in general, but i did find this album to be a little on the 'boring' side. i'm sure if i was in the right mood it would be perfect, but this album doesnt really pull me into itself. i have to want to listen to it. some of his earlier stuff, on the other hand, is just so bursting with his 'pure' energy, it appeals to me a little more.
to say that an album called "innvervisions" is void of ego or self-consciousness is just stupid. stevie wrote all the songs, and basically played all the instruments. this was his idea, his soul, his vision, to more of an extent, really, than any soul album up to that point [that i know of, at least]. this album was nothing but self-consciousness, or at least that was his aim. granted, he tries to pass himself off as innocent, pure and honest, while led zep tries to pass themselves off as gods. huge difference, but still very self conscious.
DD, you must be drunk...or at least DRUNK ON THE POWER OF THE INTERNET!!!
ReplyDeleteyou certainly hear these artists through a much different filter than i do. i can't hear stevie trying to pass himself off as pure, honest and innocent. first track, he's doing bumps with a girl. higher ground, he's telling soldiers to keep on killing, 'cause that's just the way the world works. and on many of the tracks, i get the feeling that he's speaking from a position of having been not at all perfect. not self-loathing guilt, just perspective from experience.
as for the title, i'll ask you to think about what it means in the context of the album. this is not an introspective album at all, but an outro-spective album. he's describing the world as he "sees" it. and of course, he sees things through sound. all of these visions of orange and green and tangerine and gazing into women's eyes are things he has observed, but can only see internally.
feel free to respond when you have something not completely wrong to say about this album :P
nah, stevie's innocent.
ReplyDelete"too high" isn't about doing bumps, it's a cautionary tale.
"higher ground" isn't about telling soldiers to keep warring, it's telling the listener to accept the way the world is and yet rise above it all, to be transcendent and be closer to god.
"misstra know it all" is -- i have to imagine -- about nixon.
many say the album is mostly about the black experience and a message to blacks (avoiding drugs, don't listen to the lies (jesus children), be better than the streets, keep living), but personally, i feel like this album is about being blind :P it's in a few of the songs rather explicitly: "i want to hold your hand / hands can understand".
the album is not egotistical. it's not turned inward at all. look at the album cover and you'll see -- this is about how stevie manages to see the world, not himself.
it was a long time before i was able to listen to stevie without hearing the sesame street cheesiness. it's the lord of the rings problem, where now, after it's been abused and imitated endlessly, the original is corny. but it was also the first, the prime mover. stevie was the first black guy who really embraced technology and used all these early synths which now sound kind of silly but which at the time were really sparkling and fresh. whereas tolkien was the first to write about elf-fucking.
i had no idea stevie was playing all these instruments himself. i knew he composed and produced a lot of his own stuff, but he played ALL of it? that's just rad.
ReplyDeleteand yeah i wasn't trying to say higher ground is pro-war, just not "innocent," but rather a bit detached and realistic. i feel like this whole album is a big departure from his younger, motown stuff that maybe i'm a little more familiar with. if anything, this album seems a bit skeptical to me...skeptical about brothers who ask for favors, skeptical about big talkers, skeptical about the system, skeptical about love.
but wonder balances out these skeptical, cautionary tales with joyous, vibrant, innocent-sounding music and straight-forward emotions. that's how i hear it anyway, as too thematically complex (or at least thematically contrasting) to be labeled outright "innocent" or "skeptical"
glad to know i'm not the only one who associates this music with sesame street. also glad to know i'm not the only one preoccupied with elf-fucking.
apparently, my words were twisted. i never said that this album was inward looking. i said it was self-conscious, and yeah, musically its nothing but. not a wasted note on here, tonnns of chord changes. almost all instruments played by stevie.
ReplyDeletebut i actually do think that in a way, its much more inward looking than his other stuff. mainly in the sense that he's expressing more honesty in how he views the world. this is not an album thats 3/4 full of love songs. this is an album of stevie being honest with himself and how he views the world, and conveying this in a preachy manner. at this point in his career he was his own man and had complete creative control. he had the freedom to express whatever he wanted, and he chose his social consciousness of the world around him. oh and he knew what was going on, too, and wants you to know that - "i'm not one who makes believe, i know the leaves are green. they only change to brown when autumn comes around" he sings in 'Visions.' he knows how the world works. sarge, i can def see how this album is a message to blacks.
and i dont think its skeptical at all. its preachy. because ultimately, he's optimistic - "gonna keep on trying, till i reach my highest ground."
the track 'visions,' is by far the most inward looking track on here, and gives a glimpse into his dream - "people hand in hand, have i lived to see the milk and honey land? where hate's a dream and love forever stands" then he asks if this is real or if its a vision in his mind. this is his 'innervision,', social equality is his utopian dream. he knows how hard it will be, and his choice of music for this track makes it just seem dauntingly hard. hell, he could even be marxist. putting heroin on the same level as religion in 'jesus children' kinda brings to mind marx's phrase 'religion is the opiate of the masses.'
yes, his innervision is a social one. but its his vision, and he's finally able to express that and not be tied down by love songs. thats why i think this album is self-aware. because self awareness and social awareness are very intertwined.
i also claim that stevie's music is honest, pure and innocent. i never said he was naive, which often times is confused with innocence. innocence and purity are far too ingrained in his voice for any lyrics to change that. it'd be like mc hammer trying to sound gangsta.
eh but i still dont understand this album. i still need to give it more time, esp with the lyrics.
WOW
ReplyDeleteD just wrote all the stuff i decided i didn't need to get to. i have to say, that was incredible.
those lyrics in visions EXACTLY are about him telling people that just because he's blind, he's no idiot. he uses the imagery of green and brown and leaves, specifically because this is the sort of thing you can imagine someone saying to him "how could you understand, you don't even understand the passing of the seasons, you don't even know color". and here he comes back insisting that he understands, in his own way.
i was similarly going to cite that "milk and honey land" line as evidence of him looking for a utopia he privately suspects cannot come about. but as a blind man, with what we must only imagine is an inner world far beyond our understanding, it seems probable that he lives there in a realm of his own devising, where what to us is a daydream of peace, is to him a very real separate reality.
i admit i must have misinterpreted what you said earlier! it seems we are on the same page.
my late college roommate turned me on to stevie. he had a boombox on a high shelf above his bed in our room in burton hall, and he single handedly introduced me to stevie wonder, dr dre, snoop dogg, john coltrane, art blakey, hank mobley and warren g. he was the first person i ever knew to influence me musically.
he was the whitest dude you ever met, a rich kid from jersey, but he walked around with a malcom "X" baseball cap, simply because it was the only cap the store had that fit him, and did so without any shred of self-consciousness or awkwardness. it just didn't matter to him.
he knew i was a classical snob, and he insisted that i give stevie a chance even though i hated it at first, and before i knew it, i was standing on his bed, reaching high to put on stevie CD after CD, and i couldn't get enough of it. it became the de facto soundtrack to everything that happened in that room. soon, many in our group of friends were listening to stevie. when the kid died, we were all devastated obviously, but we were quick to admit to each other that as awful as it was to lose him, it was only slightly less awful that we would never be able to listen to stevie with the same happiness ever again.
http://cuby.us/misc/nick_shannon_elissa.png
don't mean to be too personal, but i simply cannot talk about stevie without a mention of nick -- one does not exist for me without the other. it's very, very literally the one thing in life about which i am completely inconsolable.
also sarge, might i mention, sun ra was experimenting with keyboards as far back as the 60s. granted it was free jazz and didnt have as much popular appeal as stevie, but i just thought i'd note that. sun ra even has an album from 78 that was recorded in 70, where one entire side is just him on the mini moog. its awesome, too.
ReplyDeleteDid somebody say "MC Hammer going gangsta?"
ReplyDeletewww.dailymotion.com/video/x1gdg6_mc-hammer-pumps-in-a-bump_music
DO NOT CLICK ON LINK ABOVE
ReplyDeleteits profoundly annoying and only serves as an unnecessary distraction from the album in discussion.
mc hammer repeats the chorus ad infinitum while wearing a speedo.
by the way, i love your critique of this one, sarge. you really do know this album like the back of your hand, and i am eagerly awaiting the next "back of sarge's hand" alert.
ReplyDeleteSo i've been trying to find a way to jump into this project. And this is the first album you guys have looked at that I'm actually somewhat familiar with. I don't really know where to begin (except to say that this little comment box doesn't permit moving the cursor with arrow keys or pasting text in, which terrifies me).
ReplyDeleteYou have all done a wonderful job critiquing this album. When engaging with something filtered down not only through the years, but also our personal experiences of an artist, his later work, and the person he gradually and continually became, it is quite difficult to engage with the product in question without introducing all these other contingencies. We are constantly and unavoidably influenced by our experiences. Yet despite that I feel you've done an excellent job of communicating your bare experiences.
I have little patience for social commentary and critique as pertains to art. It's not because I don't believe any such messages can be extracted from a work ("living for the city" is quite clearly an indictment of racism and the harsh socio-economic conditions of urban life, especially for poor black people). Rather, I feel such descriptions of art are transparent and often simply obvious. They are too easy. Good art should compel us to go beyond what is facile and tedious, to move past and through anything that is easily within reach. We can't be lazy. We have to take something as miraculous as this album and force it to create something inside us that transfigures our point of view. Not just our perspective, but who we see and understand ourselves to be.
It might seem I'm asking a lot of art, but why not? Too often I sit and engage with in a purely emotive sense. I look for individual tracks that register specific emotions in me. Sometimes I want to be cheered up, or brought down. Sometimes I want to be reminded of some nostalgic thing. I feel these expectations have been bred in me by years of exposure to a culture that does not fundamentally challenge art, or that expects art to challenge us back.
When sgt. phanto wrote that Stevie Wonder sees "as a blind man, with what we must only imagine is an inner world far beyond our understanding", I felt struck by the statement. I am compelled to respond. Now I understand that sgt. phanto doesn't mean that Stevie Wonder simply experiences more than we do (which would be easy enough to say, since we now have a politically correct climate that tends to attribute special uniqueness to those with disabilities -- nor am I here saying that's a bad thing to do, but I digress). Really, what strikes me about the comment is the marked /difference/ of Stevie Wonder's experience of the world.
I take it from you (who know the particulars far better than I do) that it is an undeniable fact that he wrote and composed and played most of the material on this album. Aside from being an incredible technical achievement, this affords us a profound opportunity to engage with a rare and beautiful paradox: the sensory and aesthetic encounter with profound difference. None of us (I am assuming) are blind, but we can here experience blindness transmuted through song. I find that fact alone to be breathtaking, and one that overrides any residual cheese that Stevie has accumulated by the trespass of years.
good thoughts man, good thoughts.
ReplyDeletei believe that art is especially useful as a descriptive conduit to the experience of truly different people. we're talking about a guy blind from birth, living entirely in the dark -- what a different way to live life on this earth. and we learn more about stevie's darkness from his art than we could from any reply he could give to the question "what's it like to be blind". stevie doesn't know what it's like to be blind, since he doesn't know what it's like to NOT be blind, so he cannot answer that question. his music, however, describes his world, and we can thereby gain some understanding.
for instance, you can listen to people with a mental disorder describe their inner world through words, but could it possibly be made more palpable than through their art? http://tinyurl.com/yzkaysm
ps you can solve the no-copy/arrow key bug by logging in with a blogger username i believe.
I love the phrase "residual cheese".
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