‘Village Ghetto Land’ sounds even more radical a half-century later
While we're here, let's commit blasphemy and “fix” Stevie Wonder's Songs In the Key of Life
I Fixed Your Album is an ongoing series in which I fix your albums because you put the wrong songs in the wrong order.
I sure feel like a horse’s ass for being apprehensive about what a Stevie Wonder concert would sound like in 2024. The ticket purchase was admittedly of the bucket-list/“When will I have another chance to breathe the same air as a living god?” variety. Wonder is 74, and if it’s his first time in Grand Rapids, it’s also probably going to be his last. (Memo to “cool city” marketing people — if your town is only two hours from Detroit and Stevie Wonder has never visited even for professional reasons, there might be a problem.)
But holy shit, what a performer he is. Big revelation, I know. The “still” qualifier I was tempted to use is distantly beside the point. As long as Stevie Wonder draws breath, the music will course through him in one of those rare universe-conduit ways that is hard to articulate without also under-selling the amount of labor and determination and cultivated talent required to assemble a body of music even a fraction as consequential as his. In other words, he sounds amazing — the tenor voice definitely time-worn but still forceful and heavenly and well-pitched, the 30-piece backing band monstrously good, the huge catalog of hits and deeper album tracks every bit as fiery and urgent today as it was during his peerless golden period in the 1970s.
He could put together a set list by throwing darts randomly at his discography and it would still be one of the greatest concerts most people had ever seen. As such, there were about 10 more songs I wish I’d heard during his Oct. 30th Van Andel Arena performance — the penultimate stop on his monthlong, hastily arranged “Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart” popup tour of American arenas. But who the hell am I? It does feel like a missed opportunity to bring a full string section on the road and not do “Pastime Paradise” (known to much of my generation as the source material for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”). Still, his 2.5-hour set, including the 20-minute oxygen break midway through, was a tour de force, a survey of timeless crowd-pleasers delivered by the arguably most transcendent pop figure of the 20th Century.
Among the show’s most arresting moments was when Stevie revealed exactly why the string section was there, which was to accompany him on “Village Ghetto Land,” the chamber-pop curio from “Songs In the Key of Life.” I’ve heard the album countless times, but until the other night I failed to appreciate how radical a piece of work this specific song is.
The stately orchestral track sounds almost like a wedding processional, but is meant to evoke aristocratic decadence. He actually recorded the instrumental entirely on a synthesizer, which would make this one of the rare times a live string section would be deployed to reproduce something that came from keyboards, and not vice versa.
In the cadence of a nursery rhyme or Christmas carol, Wonder paints a harrowing image of urban decay, violence and active structural deprivation. He sings of homeless people eating from garbage cans, blood and broken glass on the streets, bullets whizzing through the air, people hiding in terror behind locked doors, kids covered in sores, poor families subsisting on dog food, stillborn babies and oblivious plutocrats enlarging their predatory fortunes while the destitute kill each other over scraps. He ends with a sneer: “Now some folks say that we should be glad for what we have / Tell me, would you be happy in Village Ghetto Land?” There isn’t any redemptive “but we’re still joyful despite our hardships” ending that would resolve the listening experience for white people.
The contrast between the music and lyrics is as stark a tonal juxtaposition as a person could achieve on a mass-market pop record. Its reverse would be something like a noise band recording a catchy and sincere love song but otherwise not adjusting its sound. In the ‘70s this was an urgent, tragic plea from a Black artist who had achieved cross-cultural appeal and used his platform to deliver harsh, confrontational truths to a wider audience whose comfort with the subject did not interest him. In 2024, it is… exactly the same thing.
Momentary digression: A few years ago, a former colleague of mine at the Detroit Free Press directed a documentary called “12th & Clairmount,” released around the 50th anniversary of the Detroit uprising/riot of 1967. Primarily it consists of archival videos and home movies filmed by people before, during and after the events, presented with voice-over narration from Detroiters who lived through it. (The unrest was instigated by a police raid on an illegal after-hours blind pig tavern and continued for several days, killing dozens and injuring hundreds.) It was impossible to watch the footage of neglect, violence and destruction and not recognize how much it resembled the present day, not just in Detroit but in cities all over America. And this was in 2017, before Ferguson, before George Floyd, before whatever the hell is going to happen after this election.
It’s not that there were some observable connections and similarities between urban America in 1967 and 2017. It’s that the resemblance was so overwhelmingly apparent that it went without saying how little had changed in the half-century since those events. Nobody in the film needed to state this directly. It was implicit every second of its runtime; actually having somebody point it out would have been redundant and would even have blunted some of the film’s impact. I had a similar feeling listening to Wonder sing “Village Ghetto Land” toward the end of what was otherwise an exuberant set of timeless hits. To point out that “Village Ghetto Land” describes conditions that have barely improved in a half-century is merely to reveal one’s mastery of the obvious and ignorance of plenty else.
The wrong kind of compliment
Here’s the thing about “timeless” art. When its message is political, art’s endurance says more about the world in which it exists than the material itself. When a song so bleak and politically scathing is praised as timeless, or if we observe how well it “holds up” today, it is not a comment on the music, no matter its merits, but rather on the social conditions that allow the world described in the song to permeate, how America’s idea of itself is so frequently at odds with reality. Describing “Village Ghetto Land” as timeless is actually deeply tragic.
Hearing a forceful performance of “Village Ghetto Land” in 2024, on the eve of another apocalyptic-feeling election had an effect that was jarring, destabilizing and no doubt carefully calculated. Wonder is a mensch-like stage presence, eagerly bantering with the crowd and cracking jokes. He began the evening with a meandering speech about love and unity, themes he’d return to throughout the night, but only in the show’s later moments did he reveal an actual agenda. Between songs toward the end, he endorsed Kamala Harris and shat on Donald Trump without using either of their names. He forcefully denounced government regulation of women’s bodies and lamented the atmosphere of rancor that has dominated American politics in the last decade. He alluded angrily to Trump’s recent Detroit-bashing, which happened during a campaign stop in Detroit, the motherfucker.
The crowd in West Michigan seemed receptive to all of this. (Contrary to its reputation, Grand Rapids proper has been reliably blue for a while, although the suburbs are a nightmare.) If there were Trumpers in the audience at a Stevie Wonder show in 2024, they were at least quiet, although it’s hard to imagine any gathering of 10,000 people in Michigan being completely devoid of worm-brained MAGA people. The message to them would be: Fuck off; you don’t get to just enjoy a bunch of classic pop songs without having your jackass worldview challenged. If you’re coming into Stevie’s world, you’re doing it on his terms.
This has always been true. Wonder might be the ultimate negation of “Just shut up about politics and play the hits,” because the hits are all politics. As lovingly detailed in the critic Wesley Morris’ recent podcast series “The Wonder of Stevie,” the maestro’s classic run in the 1970s is some of the most radical and confrontational Black popular art ever made. He was shitting on Nixon before it was cool. His work is indifferent to any aspect of the white experience beyond complicity and complacency.
“Songs In the Key of Life” will turn 50 in a couple of years, which surely will occasion a lot of analysis and reappraisal, but there aren’t many defensible contrarian takes on that album or the ones preceding it. My hottest Stevie Wonder opinions simply involve the boundaries of his golden period: It actually begins with “Where I’m Coming From” in 1971 (vs. “Music of My Mind” the following year) and doesn’t end until “Hotter Than July” in 1980 — so yes, it includes the plant album. My sizzling take on “Songs In the Key of Life” is that “Village Ghetto Land” should be the opening track, because how great a head-fake would that have been?
The least necessary album-edit job ever performed
Well, since we’re talking about album sequencing, how about I commit some blasphemy and make a one-disc version of “Songs In the Key of Life”? For those just joining, I do a wildly popular series called I Fixed Your Album, in which I rebuild/edit well- and lesser-known albums because the artists put the wrong songs in the wrong order. Several versions of this exercise involve cropping famous double albums into the single albums they probably should have been. Should “Songs In the Key of Life” have been a single album? Tough one. I do not argue on principle that every double album should have been edited down to one filler-free LP, but in practice that is usually true. “Songs In the Key of Life” might be the rare exception. Most famous double/companion albums inspire lots of debate about the ideal tracklist for a single-disc version, but based on a few minutes of searching, it seems as if not many people have subjected “Songs In the Key of Life” to that process. So I guess we won’t know the depth of this heresy until we try.
Here then, is my tracklist for a better(??????) version of the least in-need-of-condensing double album in the history of double albums:
The “LOL Let’s ‘Fix’ ‘Songs In the Key of Life’” version of “Songs In the Key of Life”:
Village Ghetto Land [originally disc 1, track 3]
Sir Duke [D1.T5]
Another Star [D2.T7]
Isn’t She Lovely [D2.T1]
Summer Soft [D1.T9]
Pastime Paradise [D1.T8]
Black Man [D2.T3]
Have a Talk With God [D1.T2]
I Wish [D1.T6]
As [D2.T6]
There you go. It can be done. The shortest possible version of “Songs In the Key of Life” is 10 songs at 52:34. Which means it is borderline too long for a single LP. It would be unusual to put 26 minutes of music on one side of a record but not undoable — the more music that’s on a side, the thinner the grooves and the lower the relative volume, or so they say — so what the hell, let’s just go for it. Besides, going any shorter requires some cuts that would be simply unconscionable. The five singles — “I Wish,” “Isn’t She Lovely,” “Sir Duke,” “Another Star” and “As” — are all indispensable, so that already takes care of half the tracklist. So then it’s just a matter of deciding which five of the remaining 16 album cuts, each eclectic and innovative and exhilarating in its own right, belongs on our reconstituted album. No sweat. Here we go:
1. Village Ghetto Land > 2. Sir Duke
“Village Ghetto Land,” as we’ve discussed, is the perfect table-setter. It’d be a bold choice that would foreground the social-justice motif that eventually emerges. On the original tracklist, “Village” and “Sir Duke” are separated by the virtuosic instrumental “Contusion,” as if to provide a runway for what is undoubtedly among the greatest flexes in the pop canon. “Sir Duke” is like a jazz standard in the clothing a pop-soul song (or vice versa). That opening horn line, delivered unadorned over a syncopated hi-hat, sounds like either a lost ‘70s TV theme song or the head from some big-band classic — a connection underlined when Stevie shouts out a handful of jazz greats: Count Basie, Glen Miller, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and the song’s namesake, Duke Ellington. He stuffs the arrangement with bold chromatic runs, an all-time great breakdown and a terminal climax (“You can feel it all over”) that bursts with inexhaustible swagger. What a fucking banger.
3. Another Star > 4. Isn’t She Lovely > 5. Summer Soft
“Another Star” is one of the meatiest tracks on a record full of rich courses, and it slots neatly into the ante-upping position that song three occupies on so many classic records from the Album Era of rock. It says to the listener: Oh, you thought “Sir Duke” was special? Here’s an equally astonishing workout that’s more than twice as long. Settle in.
“Isn’t She Lovely” could have gone anywhere, but I like it as the “cool down” track after the opening salvo. What else is there to say: It’s the perfect love song (father-daughter, but still), and yet another flex. About half of its 6.5-minute runtime is a harmonica solo. Indulgent, perhaps, but it’s not crazy to imagine that the harmonica is him talking to his then-newborn daughter, Aisha, knowing that she wouldn’t distinguish the words in the verses from the yearning melody of that instrument. He’s showing her what the world sounds like. Isn’t it lovely? Often, yes.
My side one ends with another tonal shift. “Summer Soft” is one of Stevie’s great heartbreakers. That verse melody actually sounds like summer turning to fall, if that’s possible, and the way he keeps modulating on the phrases “And she’s gone”/“And he’s gone” makes each utterance feel like a new knife-twist from a departing lover.
6. Pastime Paradise
The ominous fade-in makes “Pastime Paradise” the perfect leadoff to side two, which in my reconstituted version of the album is a less personal, more political run of songs. The Coolio interpolation may have made it impossible to hear “Pastime Paradise” and not think of “the shadow of death” at the sound of that string melody, but in retrospect, that almost feels duplicative. The shadow of death was already there.
7. Black Man
The “Wonder of Stevie” podcast argues that Wonder is misunderstood as a music icon and cultural figure. You’d have to bend pretty far backward to describe someone so popular as underrated, but because he is a blind, super-powered, Black former child prodigy who has kind of a cuddly affect, he tends to be infantilized or seen as a living cartoon character, rather than an artist with a precise worldview working from a palette of specific cultural traditions. “Black Man” is a great example of this dissonance: It is as unambiguously political as anything in his oeuvre — anything in ‘70s pop music, for that matter. And for a brief moment, I thought of not including it simply because I gravitate more toward subtlety (a hypocritical move on an album I’ve started with “Village Ghetto Land”), but I probably would have gone to hell for that.
8. Have a Talk With God
I don’t know if I agree with this personally, but sequencing “Have a Talk With God” right after “Black Man” would probably be an accurate expression of what Stevie would prescribe for the injustice he’s decrying elsewhere on the album. (The relationship between spirituality and systemic injustice as experienced by oppressed minority populations is about as far outside my wheelhouse as it gets.) Mainly, I love this because I’ve listened to it a thousand times and still have no idea what the sounds on the track actually are. Wonder is accurately regarded as a pioneer in the marriage of organic and electronic instrumentation in pop music, and in a lot of ways, pop is still trying to catch up to ideas he was exploring 50 years ago. His famous TONTO synth appears here more texturally than melodically, making noises that had never appeared on rock records to that point, many of which, astoundingly, have not been convincingly replicated since.
9. I Wish > 10. As
Did the whole idea of “neo-soul” originate in the first 10 seconds of “I Wish,” or did I just listen to D’Angelo’s “Black Messiah” last night? Has there ever been a better, more obvious album-closing song that failed to close its album than “As”? Has this whole exercise been pointless, even if picking and sequencing the best material on “Songs In the Key of Life” was less difficult than I imagined? Is this the record that disproves the conventional wisdom about double albums? Is our nation’s broken heart healed? Is Stevie Wonder capable of turning any swing voters?
The answer to some of those questions is surely yes, but maybe not the ones I would hope.