Live/Living Top Ten: Living for the City (#8)

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Happy new week! Sis-in-law is on her way to the rehab facility for continued treatment of her new shoulder. And I’m on my way to giving you another song with “live” in the title. Let’s see…we’ve had country-rock and rock, so obviously we have to go to funk next. Here we go! #8: Living for the City - Stevie Wonder Oh, what a depressing song. And this is the “edited” (for time) version: the full album version (over seven minutes long) is even worse. Having driven through the Mississippi Delta earlier this month on vacation, the idea of “Hard Time, Mississippi” is quite evident. There was a joke Jethro Burns used to tell about his neighborhood in Knoxville, Tennessee: “A tornado came through and did $10,000 in improvements.” It’s like you drive from a nice American city into a third-world country. And that’s just distressing. So Stevie Wonder put that awful, hard-working, barely-surviving life (“you can bet he doesn’t make a dollar”) to a great melody and people were boogeying their butts off to it. Kind of like Marvin Gaye’s songs in the same era: there’s a strong message there if you’ll stop dancing long enough to hear it. Living for the City Written by Stevie Wonder Recorded by Stevie Wonder From Innervisions, 1973 Never are they dirty: