“Love’s in need of love today./Don’t delay, send yours in right away./ Hate’s going ’round, breaking many hearts./Stop it, please, before it’s gone too far.” —Stevie Wonder
He’s been playing ecstatic music since he was a young boy. He is a multi-instrumentalist, and transformed R&B with electronic instruments and African-inspired rhythms. He helped shape the 33-rpm album genre into cohesive, complex artistic statements. He has won 25 Grammy Awards and has sold 100 million records worldwide. He has written or co-written numerous hit songs recorded by other artists, including Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown,” Michael Jackson’s “I Can’t Help It,” and Aretha’s “Until You Come Back to Me.” And he’s done all this, and much more, as a blind Black person in America.
He has never hesitated to speak out on social-justice issues and to lend his creativity to progressive causes and the relief of suffering. He was an activist against apartheid and dedicated his 1985 Academy Award to Nelson Mandela. He was a key campaigner to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday into a national holiday. His played at Barack Obama’s Inauguration in 2009, and has twice performed at the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics World Games. His honors include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and a 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2009 he was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace.
And now, at age 70, Stevie Wonder has “grown weary of America’s infuriating and mystifying unwillingness to accept all of its citizens equally” and is moving to Ghana, permanently. He said so in an interview with Oprah Winfrey last November. “I don’t want to see my children’s children’s children have to say. ‘Oh please like me, please respect me. Please know that I am important. Please value me,’” he said.
“I think America needs five years of atonement,”Stevie told Oprah. “I challenge you to do that. To take the time out, look at the wrongs and the things that have happened, and say, We're going to fix this."
Five years of atonement? There’s been hardly a peep about his imminent move, about our loss of a musical genius because of our racism, about the shame we should be feeling and the apologies we should be making and the vast, its-about-time changes that are needed . . .
“I’m gonna rap on your door, tap on your window pane./I’m gonna tell you, baby, the changes that I’m going through./Until you come back to me, that’s what I’m gonna do.” —Stevie Wonder
—Lawrence Bush for Alte: Getting Old Together
Fingertips
Thanks for this story. May he live long and well and may his children thrive. Our loss for sure!
thanks for reminding us about this remarkable man, musician, activist who is living his truth. I wish we all had a more humane and truth about equality to share. I saw him when he started out as a young musician @ the "Murray the "K" show @ the Rko fox downtown Brooklyn . I am the same age and was so excited seeing a guy of the same age, play and garner such respect and. applause.