I remember being in Chicago back in the day, listening to an FM rock station. After a bevy of alternative rock, the DJ suddenly put on the Waltz from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. At the art store where I worked, one of the young hipsters immediately yelled, "Tchaikovsky!" and began conducting with her hands. I'll never forget that moment. We had gone from, say, Throwing Muses to Tchaikovsky, and I remember thinking: How cool was that? Here was music making its own case. It didn't plead. It didn't demand. In its own way, it rocked. And then, after that glorious interlude, it was back to alternative rock. The funny thing was that the classical piece had not seemed out of place. It held its own. It brought to the table its own heft, its own weight. It wasn't preachy. It wasn't better than. It was simply another fiber in the fabric of the day. And maybe that's the way great music should be heard. Not fenced off by genre. Not placed behind glass. Not approa...
Here's a two-fisted, "I'll take on any man here"—as Massive Attack puts it on "Protection"—statement that I'm happy to stand behind:Stevie Wonder's Music of My Mind was the beginning of his Bach-glory phase.
Yes, you heard me.
This album kicked off a series of six—count 'em, six—albums in which this uncategorizable (let's invent a word for a master who has no peer except other masters like, well, Bach) poet of the ear and mind produced, one after another, masterpieces that searched and probed, slipped through slivers one minute, then spread "astounded wings"—to steal from Samuel Delany—over the hearts and heads of music lovers the next.
The Six:
Music of My Mind.
Talking Book.
Innervisions.
Fulfillingness' First Finale.
Songs in the Key of Life.
Hotter Than July.
There has never been a run like this.
Masterpiece after masterpiece, with no shirking in the ranks. Each album a statement. Each a journey unto itself. Each a mind-expanding adventure capable of delighting and refreshing the spirit even today.
(Of course, I don't include The Secret Life of Plants in this march to glory—hey, nobody's perfect!)
And where did I get this idea of music refreshing the spirit and the mind?
J.S. himself.
Stevie was on that kind of roll.
Like Bach, Stevie mastered the instruments within his ken. Whatever was at hand, he made it work. He was also a world-class poet of song, writing most of his own lyrics.
And though blind, Stevie was blind as Homer was blind.
Their impaired states hindered them not.
They sang.
And boy, did they sing.
Which brings us to "Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)."
I'm arguing that "Superwoman," the second song on Music of My Mind, is our first great introduction to the mature genius Stevie had become at twenty-one.
This was already his fourteenth studio album!
Well, the thirteen that came before? Excellent prologues.
"Superwoman" begins by stating its case plainly: the difficulties of a relationship, the realization that perhaps you never knew the person you loved quite as well as you thought you did.
Then comes that observation:
"Very well, I believe I know you…"
The chorus takes Stevie's side.
And then—
boom!
Mid-song, Stevie puts his complaint on wings.
The song breaks into sky.
It soars.
Even the words begin searching for the stars as Stevie turns from observation toward absence, memory, accusation and loss:
"When the summer came, you were not around…"
Suddenly this isn't merely a song about two people having problems.
It's yearning.
Where were you?
Where did you go?
Where were you when I needed you?
And Stevie still isn't finished.
A delicately shaped guitar solo sings its own lament, almost like a John Dowland urging from another age. Then comes the passion—the accusation mixed with loss, longing and pleading, carried by that irrepressible voice.
And finally the song seems almost to dissolve.
As if ending in a dream.
I know.
Because once you hear "Superwoman," you can hear a great door opening.
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