Stevie Wonder turned 75 earlier this month. Happy birthday Mr Wonder!
‘You Haven't Done Nothin'’ arrived on Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974), part of a supreme run that included Innervisions the previous year and Talking Book the year before that. Those albums came in the middle of what’s considered his “classic period”, starting with Music Of My Mind (1972) and closing with Songs In The Key Of Life (1976).
The song opens with trickly synthesizer and a drum machine before the main groove gets underway. Even people who aren’t very familiar with Stevie may recognise the wriggly clavinet sound made so famous by his ‘Superstition’.
‘You Haven't Done Nothin'’ was Wonder’s second criticism of Richard Nixon (after ‘He's Misstra Know-It-All’ on Innervisions). Stevie sings, “But we are sick and tired of hearing your song / Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong”. Nixon resigned two days after the single release.
Wonder’s funk was more multifaceted than James Brown’s, but he used the One to great effect. From the first lyric, “We are amazed but not amused” the heavy emphasis on the first beat of the bar, arriving on “are”, gives an intensity to Stevie’s words before he's even got to the point.
In this song he uses a bridge section quite differently to Brown would, covering more melodic ground and focusing on chord changes rather than a variation on the groove. With the first line of the bridge, “But we are sick and tired of hearing your song” (and later, “Why do you keep on making us hear your song?”), there’s a more wandering feel with light Rhodes piano chords, before Reggie McBride’s descending bass leads the way to the One and the main horn riff.
Though most of the album’s instrumentation was played by Wonder himself, he did invite some stellar guests, including James Jamerson to play acoustic bass on ‘Too Shy to Say’, Minnie Riperton to sing on ‘Creepin'’, and the Jackson 5 to sing background vocals on this track – “Jackson 5 join along with me, say / Doo-doo-wop!” What such exclamations have to do with Nixon isn’t clear. Anyone who has watched Nixon might wonder if he had a single funky bone in his body. Maybe Stevie was so sick of his presidency that some cathartic doo-doo-wopping was in order. Even when he’s funkin’, though, Stevie slips in some pointed lyrics: “Stand up and be counted” (3:06).
Top image from Discogs.