The first notes of Songs in the Key of Life waft up from a choir of humming colored folks who might be refugees from Vincente Minnelli's Cabin in the Sky. Their music is mellifluous, placid, and elevated; it seems to epitomize (as black critic Donald Bogle wrote of Cabin in the Sky) "ersatz Negro folk culture … passed off as the real thing." The catch is that this ersatz culture may be the real thing….

Fallacious or not, questions of intention arise immediately, as they so often do in popular culture. In order to understand what is actually going on here we are well-advised to try to determine what is supposed to be going on. So if we've forgotten for a moment who this artist is, with his "serious news for everybody," we are now obliged to remember. This is Stevie Wonder. He is black and considers that an advantage; he is blind and given to mystic visions. His music is both meticulous and wildly expressionistic; his words combine a preacher's eloquence with an autodidact's clumsiness. And a small detail: In one of his best and favorite jokes, he impersonates a disc jockey, everybody's friendly announcer.

Who can gauge what intentions these credentials imply? Perhaps. Stevie Wonder hopes to reclaim an unfairly discredited manifestation of black culture—the genteel Hollywood gospel chorus—with his blessing. Or perhaps the chorus … merely reifies the man's idealist notion of black spirituality. Perhaps the musical ambiguity is deliberate, the stilted language a gentle gibe at the "announcer," at Stevie himself. Or perhaps it's all just sloppiness. Only two things are clear. First, this man is too secure in his own artistic power to concern himself with such quibbles; he doesn't worry whether we think he's wise or foolish, careless or precise. Second, this music is so audacious and so gorgeous that it seems pointless for us to worry about it either.

That is to say, among other things, that this album has presence—it's really out there—and that its presence counts for something. (p. 50)

The irresistible beauty of this record calls for inept superlatives…. [Songs in the Key of Life] is a flawed [masterpiece] not in the manner of Dylan and the Stones, who cultivated a rough tone that made flaws inevitable, even welcome …, but by identifiable mistakes, failures of taste and concept. In this it reminds me a lot of Carole King's Tapestry. Especially since Tapestry was King's breakthrough, whereas Songs in the Key of Life is Stevie Wonder's fulfillingness, the parallel is far from exact, and it may bring sarcastic moans from the skeptical. But those who remember how fresh Tapestry sounded before it was transmogrified into an aural totem—the delight of finding that when a promising artist surpasses her potential, there's no way a few banal passages can diminish the general affection and admiration that results—will know what I mean.

There are errors of commission on Stevie Wonder's new masterpiece. A lot of this music (the final refrain of "Isn't She Lovely," for instance, or the homiletic "Black Man") goes on for too long; there are many awkward phrases ("founder of blood plasma"), forced rhymes ("red, blue, and white"), and uncolloquial constructions ("for Christmas what would be my toy"); several of the songs (I would name "Summer Soft" and "If It's Magic") are, hopefully, quite forgettable. Talking Book is closer to a perfect album…. A more complex and satisfying delight—a delight that combines the freewheeling energy of Dylan and the Stones with the softer accessibility of a Carole King—is provided by an artist with the ambition to ride his own considerable momentum and the talent to do more than just hang on while doing so.

My reasoning, if that's what it is, is entirely appropriate to this album…. To put it in the jargon of a time gone by, I've overcome my own negative vibrations. Such a discipline is the key to Stevie Wonder's prescription for life, what he means literally to denote when he says "love's in need of love" or warns against living in a "pastime [that is, "past time"] paradise," or, God knows, opines that "God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed." Sometimes he almost seems to mean that bad thoughts are the source of all evil, and I should point out to those sympathetic to this interpretation that its practicality is questionable, because it supplies no surefire method of eliminating the bad thoughts. I should also point out that Stevie acknowledges just this problem in "Village Ghetto Land," which serves as an empiricist postscript to the idealist "Love's in Need of Love Today" and "Have a Talk with God" by implying quite pointedly that poverty and happiness are often mutually exclusive. The man is obviously no giant ideologically, but he does have a reasonably accurate idea of what's going down.

Ideology can hardly be his specialty in any case, because the locus of ideology is written language, whereas for Stevie books must talk. In fact, no verbal analysis can do him justice. What makes the contradictory platitudes of his lyrics worth following through is the rhetorical impetus of his music. Even in the accompanying 24-page booklet the words aren't as stiff and preachy as his worst moments might have made you fear; sung or declaimed over a music much less vague and ballady than his worst moments might have made you fear, they take on a convincing vivacity. (pp. 50-1)

There is wit, pace, variety, and dimension to this music. In themselves, the words—especially as brought to life by Stevie's high-spirited multivoice—have it all over the musings of Maurice White, or Eddie Levert reciting the verse of Kenneth Gamble; they're funnier and trickier. But as validated by the music they come close to redeeming the whole genre; they make clear that no matter how annoying the sociospiritual bullshit of Earth, Wind & Fire or the O'Jays may get, it still surpasses the escapist mythopoeia and greeting-card sentimentality that passes for poetry among too many white rock-ettes these days.

If Bob Dylan, say, scores an artistic punch with the rough tone, then Stevie Wonder is familiar with the artistic benefits of the genteel tone. He wants something like that gospel chorus in the sky—a chorus which has echoed through much of the most ambitious black music—just because of what it can say to masses of people. Sometimes he takes his advantage in a straightforward and seemly way—with synthesized strings, for instance, or with the beauty of that chorus itself—but sometimes he makes it work ass-backwards. His literary gaffes and ideological inadequacies can be blamed on confused cultural aspirations only after we're sure blame is called for; it may well be that it is only through such indiscretions that the earth-shattering, or/ -mending, presumption of his music can be conveyed. A blind man who can envision a time "when the rainbow burns the stars out of the sky" or write a song called "Ebony Eyes" is like a black man who can stick Glenn Miller in between Count Basie and Louis Armstrong in a litany of music heroes. He doesn't even acknowledge limitations that some would hope were beneath him. As in most rock and roll masterpieces, the flaws are a part of the challenge, and of the fun. (p. 51)