Post a controversial music opinion

I agree with both of the preceding posts.

I'd go Songs... > Talking Book > Fulfillingness' > Innervisions, but there are no wrong answers when we're talking peak Stevie

If Songs had been a single album, it would be the best by a wide margin.

In the spirit of this thread, let me also state for the record that the Red Hot Chili Pepper's version of "Higher Ground" is better than the one on "Innervisions".

There are like 5 Stevie Wonder songs I adore and consider some of the best music ever made. I can do without the rest of his catalog, don't care for a lot of the textures he uses and other production choices. Basically he's the 70s Prince wrt me.

Curtis>>> Stevie

If Songs... didn't start with one of the most boring songs on earth, it would be... better than it is.

There are like 5 Stevie Wonder songs I adore and consider some of the best music ever made. I can do without the rest of his catalog, don't care for a lot of the textures he uses and other production choices. Basically he's the 70s Prince wrt me.

Agree with this, except Prince has more songs I like.

"70s Prince" is not a formulation I had thought of but it i pretty apt.

I can't think of a similarly prolific artist with no duds in their catalog.

There are some artists who produced very little output but all of it was excellent. Like Katharine Anne Porter. Most folks with a lot of output have some filler or failed experiments in there.

I can't think of a similarly prolific artist with no duds in their catalog.

i'm assuming we are talking about prince through sign o the times

Curtis>>> Stevie

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Monday, February 28, 2022 3:31 PM

otm

I like Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants better than the previous four Stevie Wonder albums.

now there's a controversial opinion

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this on here, but I know a surprising story about Axl Rose. I once read a biography of the Pet Shop Boys, where they claimed Axl Rose was a huge behind-the-scenes PSB fanboy. He even brought them a bouquet of red roses and told them that their song 'October Symphony' was his inspiration for 'November Rain'. This was in the early 90s, at the height of GnR's fame. Who would have thought?

I should say, he waited for them backstage at a show and brought them flowers.

I like the sound of construction in the next door neighbour’s apartment more than the big four Stevie albums, since we’re bringing up old (but long felt) controps

Hell is not other people, hell is having to your shopping list cover seven different aisles in the pharmacy and having “Isn’t She Lovely” come on

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this on here, but I know a surprising story about Axl Rose. I once read a biography of the Pet Shop Boys, where they claimed Axl Rose was a huge behind-the-scenes PSB fanboy. He even brought them a bouquet of red roses and told them that their song 'October Symphony' was his inspiration for 'November Rain'. This was in the early 90s, at the height of GnR's fame. Who would have thought?

No secret -- Chris Heath's second PSB bio interviewed Axl aboutthem.

Other people put elastic bands around their wrists and snap them when they’re trying to train their brain out of negative thought patterns. I just think the words “Pastime Paradise” and success follows

I'm all for killing sacred cows, but Stevie Wonder's production choices during his imperial run are so...basic? In fact, he emphasizes the drums, to his credit because he's a distinctive drum player. He doesn't oversing. FFF is darker than an icon decided to be in 1974.

I thought deciding SITKOL as his least impressive imperial run album was long settled -- if you're not working for Rolling Stone?

Discovering those five or six classic Wonder albums thirty years ago meant avoiding "Isn't She Lovely" and realizing how damn ruminative and worrying he could be, i.e. "Vision," "Creepin'," "All in Love is Fair," "Evil," not to mention the stuff he wrote and produced for Syreeta.

*"Visions"

"isn't she lovely" is great

Yeah wtf

i can understand why alfred would loathe it though

Alfred, love all those songs you mention. Another one that fits in there is "They Won't Go When I Go." I also have a deep love for "Big Brother" and how it emerges from the fading "Superstition" (it always startles me that they don't actually fade in, it is always such a slick segue in my mind)

"You've killed all our leaders / I don't even have to do nothing to you, you cause your own country to fall"

Damn.

"Isn't She Lovely" suffers from the same problem as many other tracks on SitKoL, especially on the second record, which is that it goes on forever, just vamping.

my take on the big 4*:

Talking Book - the songs are undeniable
Innervisions - best achievement piecing it all together, integrating the best qualities of the other 3 albums
FFF - most musically cohesive, most pleasing to the ears
SitKoL - least musically cohesive by a long shot, but so many tracks that are just massive. it is more like a collection of EPs or something

*(Music of My Mind I love just as much as the others most days, but it is such a transition album, with Stevie discovering what he can do when set loose to follow his muse. Which is a big part of what makes it so warm and endearing, but it is a different thing from the other 4)

sorry, the “70s Prince” title is already taken, and it’s not even a con-tro-ver-sy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp8WL621uGM

I like the 1999 album more since I got the box set and could recreate the album almost entirely with single edits.

Not liking Stevie Wonder leaps over “controversial” into “just weird”

Nah, it's very easy to not like Stevie Wonder. I was born in December 1971, but nobody I knew listened to him when I was a kid — my mom listened to, like, John Denver and Carole King and James Taylor. So I didn't hear Stevie Wonder until I was starting to pay attention to pop music on my own in the early '80s, and that was when he was doing corny-ass bullshit like "I Just Called To Say I Love You" and "Don't Drive Drunk" and appearing on The Cosby Show. Nobody was playing Innervisions or Talking Book in my world; I didn't hear those albums until the late '90s, probably, and even then I didn't fully connect with them because the hard funk stuff was always balanced/undermined by the gooey ballads. The truth is, even on his classic early '70s run, there are deep album cuts that are stronger than the singles, and also... Stevie Wonder never seemed as cool to me as P-Funk or James Brown or Earth, Wind & Fire. And I'm not big on lyrics in general, but with a few exceptions, he's a pretty bad lyricist — there's always a certain awkwardness to his lines, they rarely land right with me.

There are like 5 Stevie Wonder songs I adore and consider some of the best music ever made. I can do without the rest of his catalog, don't care for a lot of the textures he uses and other production choices. Basically he's the 70s Prince wrt me.

I like about two dozen songs by Wonder and Prince, each over a dozen albums. When they're great, I love it; when they're good, I acknowledge it but don't feel compelled to revisit.

I love imperial-phase Stevie, including the "gooey ballads," but I think those are fair criticisms.

xp

All of your hating on Stevie Wonder are out of your fucking minds, get on SSRIs if you're not already, wtf

The Velvet Underground just weren't that good. They certainly don't merit the regard in which they are held.

YEAH BUT LIKE EVERYONE WHO HEARD THEIR ALBUMS STARTED A BAND

but fr— vu is a perfect example of something that's totally overrated but still fairly decent. see also: the beatles, my bloody valentine, stevie wonder, etc.

the key to appreciating stevie's "gooey ballads" is to listen to any of the other schlock that was clogging up the charts around the time of his classic run.

also is "visions" a gooey ballad? "as"? "heaven is a zillion lightyears away"? "i believe"? these are all immaculately constructed songs. they may be on the slow side, but they're def not boring. i even like "sunshine," beautiful little song

the only ballad of his from his big four that i skip is "they won't go when i go"

"All in Love is Fair" is pretty damn sinister.

the key to appreciating stevie's "gooey ballads" is to listen to any of the other schlock that was clogging up the charts around the time of his classic run.

"Mmm, this is garbage, but at least it's not garbage someone pissed on! Yum!"

vu is a perfect example of something that's totally overrated but still fairly decent. see also: the beatles, my bloody valentine, stevie wonder, etc.

― get shrunk by this funk. (Austin)

Yeah I agree with this. I like them all but they’re not as essential and/or important to music as some people want you to believe.

I don't understand, Moka.

I don't like The Doors, but they're Important and Influential. One has nothing to do with the other.

No, of course they are influential. Very much so.

I mean that music doesn’t exist in a vacuum, The Beatles weren’t doing things that were radically different, they were setting trends and the faces of rock/pop for a decade but they were absorbing the sounds bubbling up around them… the music panorama of the 60’s wouldn’t have been that different without them imho.

MBV and VU are definitely more unique but their status as being the most influential artists of their era seems a bit overblown to me.

As a counterexample I’d put a band like Pink Floyd as beingessential and/or influential as they say it is. I can’t think of any band from the same era that could have been a good substitute to what they were doing and the amount of influence and popularity they had in the 70’s.

idk if i follow this, the main argument in favor of the vu's influence is that they were little-noticed in their time but had an outsized influence on alternative music made in subsequent decades, not that they were particularly influential to the sounds of 60s music

doesn't matter where the influence manifested. they're still not as good as the majority would have one believe.

pink floyd is a good example of the inverse: the music of the 70s (and a lot that came after) sounds completely different without them.

the doors: now there's a truly shitty, truly overrated band. given the choice between listening to a doors album or a dog barking for 40 minutes, i'm picking the dog 100% of the time.

What if the dog is barking “People Are Strange”

yeah, i'm fine with that.

Austin have you heard "Doghouse by Neil Young?

Someone needs to make one of those novelty records where all of Jim Morrison's vocals are replaced with barking dogs.

Pink Floyd's "Doghouse by Neil Young." On Ummagumma.