Stevie Wonder is a fool. I state it that way—baldly, without qualification—because the qualifications are so obvious that they tempt us away from the truth. I'm not saying he's a complete fool; in fact, I'm not saying he isn't a genius. But you can't deny that if you were to turn on a phone-in station and hear Stevie rapping about divine vibrations and universal brotherhood, especially with that inevitable dash of astrology, you would not be impressed with his intellectual discernment….

Stevie's blather has more dimensions—about six in all—than that of the average Leon Lewis fan or rock and roll pundit. Foolishness is an annoyance; cosmic foolishness is an offense. Elton John and John Denver may be no smarter than the guy who tried to sell you Earth Shoes last week, but like most salesmen they do maintain a certain feel for the concrete….

EJ and JD, together with SW, are the pop music heroes of the year, and perhaps the decade, and all three are united by simple-mindedness of a sort that seemed to have disappeared from rock and roll atavars a decade ago….

Stevie's early precursors—blind genius Ray Charles, love-crowd soul fave Otis Redding, Grammy perennial Aretha Franklin—never indulged in the sort of wary self-knowledge that makes for contrasts as intense as Beatles/John and Taylor/Denver. Stevie might have seemed callow against their down-to-earth maturity, but callowness is natural in a child prodigy. His real model, however, was Sly Stone, who like so many rock (not soul) stars resolved the paradox of personal power within a supposedly communal music by pretending to inscrutability. Sly's public pronouncements are incoherent to the point of put-on, which opens that incoherence to further analysis, while Stevie's nonsense is accentuated by the earnest context in which it occurs. (p. 128)

I've often wondered about the visual imagery running through the songs of our blind genius. Maybe the eye bias of our thought and language forced him to go lookin' for another pure love, but it seems fair to surmise that only his deplorable penchant for cliches—metaphors so hackneyed they become abstract—turns that love into the apple of his eye. Even in "Visions" a title that refers explicitly to the phrase "vision in my mind," he goes on: "I'm not the one who make-believes / I know that leaves are green / They only turn to brown when autumn comes around." If he's blind, how does the fool know the leaves are green?…

I found myself moved by the "visions in my mind" idea, for obviously the man could enjoy no other, and suddenly I understood how he knew the color of the leaves—he had been told it was so, and he had no choice but to believe.

That was the definitive condition of his life. Much more than you or me, he was in contact with the unconscious acts of faith that get every one of us through each day.

I began by calling Stevie Wonder a fool because that is the kind of judgment we shy away from—after all, the man is blind, he is black, and we love him. But if he is a fool, he is a sainted fool. His simplicity will not save us—what will?—but it will do us more good than the simplicity of John Denver or Elton John. We may enjoy their simplicity, we may find it useful … but we do not need it. It just may be that we need Stevie Wonder.

The persistence of hope which we call faith has always energized black music, and in Stevie this energy is intensified—because of his blindness, and because of his fortune as a survivor. Stevie may sometimes be sanctimonious as well as sanctified; his musical expansiveness may puff him up; his dream of brotherhood for our grandchildren may cloud over the ironies of our condition more than he can ever understand. But he really isn't one who make-believes. Instead, he creates an aural universe—or maybe I should call it an aural condition—so rich that it makes us believe. His multiplicity of voices, his heavenly tunes, his wild ear humor, and even his integration of the synthesizer all speak of a free future not dreamt of in our philosophy. And it is not foolish to believe that the transcendence of philosophy is the reason we want music in our lives. (p. 129)