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Innervisions

Certain Songs #2505: Stevie Wonder – “He’s Misstra Know-It-All”

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Album: Innervisions
Year: 1973

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That the final track on Innervisions — the utterly sublime “He’s Misstra Know-It-All” — was an anti-Richard Nixon song is something that I’ve known for awhile, but what I didn’t know was the genesis of the song. Apparently associate producer Malcolm Cecil had been giving Stevie shit for some time about all of the love songs he’d been writing, and challenged him to write some more topical songs. Thus, songs like “Too High,” “Living For The City” and, of course “He’s Misstra Know-It-All.”

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Certain Songs #2504: Stevie Wonder – “Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing”

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Album: Innervisions
Year: 1973

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But Innervisions wasn’t all philosophy and politics; at least that seemed to be the case with the third single, the salsa-flavored “Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing, which opened up with just Stevie at a piano spouting what seems to be complete gibberish before launching into an pickup routine declaring all of the places he’s been to (including the prescient “Iraq, Iran”) before declaring himself a very fluent Spanish speaker because he knows the word “chévere,” which roughly translates to “groovy.”

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Certain Songs #2503: Stevie Wonder – “Living For The City”

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Album: Innervisions
Year: 1973

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Of course when I first heard my eventual favorite Stevie Wonder song, it was just the shortened single version on KYNO-AM, which they didn’t even have to edit to make a single, as there is a repeated chant of “living for the city” about halfway through which was perfect for the single fade.

So I’ll just say that I don’t exactly remember when I heard the full album version, but I know it was over the radio and I know that it blew my mind, and I know this apocalyptic art-funk cautionary tale is not just the greatest thing that Wonder ever recorded, but one of the greatest things anybody ever recorded. And except for “other voices” in the middle, every single fucking note was Stevie Fucking Wonder.

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