This portrait of the protagonist’s parents points to the structural racism that long characterized the US labor market, with African Americans consigned to long hours, low pay, and backbreaking work as their lot in life, and black women in particular stuck with few options outside domestic work. Living just enough, just enough for the city, yeah His mother goes to scrub the floors for many/Īnd you’d best believe, she hardly gets a penny/ His father works some days for fourteen hours/Īnd you can bet, he barely makes a dollar/ Living just enough, just enough for the city To keep him strong, moving in the right direction/ Surrounded by four walls that ain’t so pretty/ “Living for the City” is the third track on 1973’s Innervisions, an album brimming with beautiful balladry, melodic funk, rollicking rock, and searing social commentary.Īn epic story song, “Living for the City” profiles the misfortunes of a young black man pushed into the poverty-to-prison pipeline. And he always will.īut back to the Master Blaster himself, it’s high time he’s honored with a Labor Song of the Month. Those are as brilliant a set of five albums as we’ve ever seen.” Obama already had my vote at that point, but that bit of wisdom insured that he would always get the benefit of the doubt from me. … When I was at that point where you start getting involved in music, Stevie had that run with Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Innervisions, and then Songs in the Key of Life. As Obama opined to Rolling Stone while on the campaign trail in 2008, “If I had one musical hero, it would have to be Stevie Wonder. I miss many things about the Obama presidency (public policy, human decency, family values, etc.), but on a very personal level I loved having a commander-in-chief cool enough to riff like a music geek.

As both a singles artist and an album maker, as a vocalist and a multi-instrumentalist, Wonder simply had no peers, whether in terms of productivity or creativity. Stevie Wonder is flat out the greatest American musician of the 1970s (I’m talking about the field of popular music broadly conceived - pop, rock, r&b, punk, etc.). Daniel Graff is Director of the Higgins Labor Program and Professor of the Practice in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame.

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