Weeks: 1
This is a rare ray of light from the 70s. Stevie Wonder is a genuine talent, and this is a great funky rock song of the type that somehow rarely rose to the top of the charts in the 70s. I almost picked an excellent studio performance video of this song, but the quality of its bass wasn't great and it wasn't quite as tightly edited.
That studio performance does a great job of showing each instrument and calling out its addition to the performance. I hadn't even detected the bongos in the song, but once I saw them, I certainly heard them and appreciated their value. And that's a great resource to have, because otherwise the tight integration of the music makes it difficult to pick out each instrument's integration. And yet I still find myself unable to say much more than this: This is an awesome wall of sound.
Obviously the organ/synthesizer part is the featured component and the backbone of this song. It makes this song stand out within the first 20 seconds, and is certainly the most-recognized part of the song. The trumpet line is probably less appreciated, but is just as important and just as effective. The trumpet line is superb, and the song is almost defined as the parts where the trumpets are playing and the parts where you're waiting for the trumpets to come back. The bass line complements the trumpet line, and would be great in any song, but here it's merely providing an excellent foundation. The drum line is also great.
Steve Wonder's vocals are also wonderful. He knows when to sing it straight, and when to embellish it. And he knows when to scream in an effective way. Like all the other instruments, his voice blends in to create an excellent whole.
The lyrics are a seemingly simple assertion that living your life by superstition is no way to live. "When you believe in things that you don't understand then you suffer. Superstition ain't the way." If there's a deeper meaning, I'm not sure I can extract it. I suppose there isn't a lot of clever phrasing to the lyrics or anything, but it doesn't really matter. When the music is as great as this, as long as the lyrics don't seem to contradict each other, the lyrics are fairly irrelevant.
My verdict: Like it. It's a funky classic, and a standout song from a decade I don't usually care for.
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