Innervisions by Stevie Wonder

Innervisions is the 16th studio album by American musician Stevie Wonder, released August 3, 1973, on the Tamla label for Motown Records, a landmark recording of his "classic period". The nine tracks of Innervisions encompass a wide range of themes and issues: from drug abuse in "Too High", through inequality and systemic racism in "Living for the City", to love in the ballads "All in Love Is Fair" and "Golden Lady". The album's closer, "He's Misstra Know-It-All", is a scathing attack on then-US President Richard Nixon, similar to Wonder's song a year later, "You Haven't Done Nothin'".Innervisions debuted on the Billboard albums chart on August 18, 1973 at number 85, then climbed up weekly to number 22, number 14, number nine, number six until reaching its peak position of number four on September 15. As with many of Stevie Wonder's albums, the lyrics, composition and production are almost entirely his own work, with the ARP synthesizer used prominently throughout the album. The instrument was a common motif among musicians of the time because of its ability to construct a complete sound environment. Wonder was the first black artist to experiment with this technology on a mass scale, and Innervisions was hugely influential on the subsequent future of commercial black music. He also played all or virtually all instruments on six of the album's nine tracks, making most of Innervisions a representative one-man band. Innervisions won Grammy Awards for Album of the Year and Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording in 1974, while "Living for the City" won the Grammy for Best R&B Song. Innervisions has been considered by many fans, critics, and colleagues to be one of Stevie Wonder's finest works and one of the greatest albums ever made. The album was revisited countless times in different lists of the greatest albums of all time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 23 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and re-ranked number 24 in the 2012 book version. The song "Living for the City" was one of the first soul music songs to deal explicitly with systemic racism and to use everyday sounds of the street like traffic, voices and sirens which were combined with the music recorded in the studio.