Stevie Wonder

"Skeletons," the sly first single from Characters, is a brilliant Wonder work, an edgy number
driven by the same socially conscious anger that fueled his Seventies classics "You Haven't
Done Nothin," "Living for the City" and "Big Brother." Whether or not "Skeletons" was
written as Stevie's soundtrack to the Contragate scandal ("They're gettin' ready to
deal/You're gettin' ready to ill/Somebody done just dropped the big dime/And th... More >

Nine lines in, he assumes the voice of God to assure sufferers that everything's gonna be all right, and instantly you lose heart. But then his chronic self-importance disappears--the worst it gets is spacy, and Stevie can make spacy a trip when he's on. Which he definitely is--melodically, rhythmically, emotionally, politically, sonically. Erupting in anti-Reagan rhymes or imagining a nasty joint or keying a love ballad to his own recorded bodily rhythms or whomping a groove with Michael Jackson or finding the balance between black-pride lyricism and antiapartheid militance, he sounds like he's got something to prove again. Ronald Reagan can do that to a black hero. So can Prince. (Grade: A-)