I just got Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions the other day. Yeah, I know, where have I been the past 31 years. Well I was waiting for it to come out on CD. That accounts for at least 15 years or so.
Anyway, in the song Living For The City, he’s obviously singing about a black family. Why then the lyric,
His sister’s black, but she is sho’ nuff pretty.
What else would she be but black? Or is it a perhaps a reference to being darker in complexion?
With that out of the way, I can’t say enough what an awesome, awesome disc this is. I think my tastes have grown over the years and I especially love the jazz feel that it has without sacrificing the emotion. I’m looking forward to getting SW’s other five-star efforts from the 1970s, now.
Just to experience this more in context, the full refrain goes like this:
So we’re hearing commentary on 1) ethnicity 2) facial features 3) body type 4) fashion sense 5) socio-economic status 6) hygiene and 7) ambition all within the context of “living in the city.”
Personally, I think the “black but… pretty” comment is more of a cultural and racial comment than one of skin tone per se… if only because of the songwriter. Stevie is blind. What does he care how dark a black woman is?
One reason I might be wrong: The prevelant attitude among many blacks, especially in the 70s and earlier, in the that a DARK-SKINNED black woman doesn’t have an easy life or a lot of options.
Granted, African-American attitudes about beauty in black women have evolved away from the “high toned woman” standard to include all kinds of skin tones and body types since the 70’s, but Stevie’s lyrics never really made an issue of skin tone before or sense. (“Jungle Fever” soundtrack aside)
Good catch, incidentally, Spectre of Pithecanthropus.
Stevie may be blind but that can’t have prevented him from being aware of the concerns of being black, as amply demonstrated in the spoken bust-and-conviction interlude that comes later in the song. (I don’t think that part made it to radio, it was probably too controversial at the time.) Spike Lee, in School Daze, did make reference to the issues of “darkness” so I know it can be an issue.
I grant you both that the lyric is open, somewhat, to interpretation.
Black = dark-skinned was not the only interpretation a listener could grasp when this song was penned, in the height of the Black Power Movement, during the American cultural transfiguration from “Negro” to “Black” as the description of vogue. Nor was black=dark-skinned the prevelant view among young blacks.
Stevie could’ve sung “His sister’s dark” and his meaning would be plain --if me meant only skin tone. “Black”, in the context of that whole passage speaks to ethnicity, self-identification and cultural awareness as well.
But you know. 50% of one, one half of the other. Perhaps both our interpretations are correct.