ABSTRACT
In 1973 Stevie Wonder released one of the highlights of his career, “Living for the City,” on the album Innervisions. Over the decades since its release, “Living for the City” has had a signifi cant impact as a chart-topping single (reaching number 1 and number 8 on Billboard’s R&B and pop charts, respectively), an important crossover success on album-oriented radio, a centerpiece of Wonder’s live performances, the soundtrack for a controversial fi lm scene, and most of all as a political anthem of uncommon realism, intensity, durability, and poignancy revered by fans, other musicians, and critics alike (see, for instance, Th e 500 Greatest 2004). It remains idiosyncratic, certainly one of the most unusual songs ever to reach the Top Ten. But it is also an interesting and instructive example of Wonder’s use of repetition and fl ow to create a song that is at once simple and complex, natural and mannered, general and specifi c, and permeated with cultural memory, in a way that eff ectively mimics reality and makes a strong social commentary that is still applicable today. As Cintra Wilson (1996) has said, “When Spike Lee used ‘Living for the City’ as the soundtrack of his crack manifesto in ‘Jungle Fever,’ he knew what he was doing-there is no more powerful audio representation of the cruel eddies of inner-city fate.”1
