![]() ![]() Stevie Wonder Hotter Than July 1980 Motown Records, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc.In his early career, he was best known for his harmonica work, but today he is better known for his keyboard skills and vocals. Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group Happy Birthday Wonder plays the piano, synthesizer, harmonica, congas, drums, bongos, organ, melodica, and clavinet. Wonder has recorded several critically acclaimed albums and hit singles, and writes and produces songs for many of his label mates and outside artists as well. R&B number one hits), and album sales totaling more than 150 million units. number-one hits to his name (on the pop Charts, 20 U.S. He has also been awarded the Polar Music Prize.īlind from infancy, Wonder signed with Motown Records as a pre-adolescent at age twelve, and continues to perform and record for the label to this day. A prominent figure in popular music during the latter half of the 20th century, Wonder has recorded more than thirty top ten hits, won 26 Grammy Awards (a record for a solo artist), plus one for lifetime achievement, won an Academy Award for Best Song and been inducted into both the Rock and Roll and Songwriters halls of fame. Perhaps, given long enough, the rest of the world will one day react the way Noah did when he heard “Happy Birthday to You” for the first time - with stunned horror that so many people could be content to sing something so depressing.Stevie Wonder (born Stevland Hardaway Judkins on May 13, 1950, name later changed to Stevland Hardaway Morris) is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. ![]() ![]() I therefore propose that Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” be adopted as the universal norm. “Happy Birthday to You” was in a sense ruined by the craven greed of the music executives who wanted to monetize it at the expense of the people. But by then, the cultural damage, the decades of careful evasion that kept the familiar melody out of movies and TV, had been done. The track was justly inducted into the public domain in 2013, after a clever documentarian filed a class action lawsuit against the record label. Its been 40 years since Stevie Wonder released 'Happy Birthday' in honor of MLK, which ignited the campaign to commemorate him. In addition to being boring, repetitive and brutally cheerless, “Happy Birthday to You” has the distinction of having been mired in litigious controversy for the better part of a century, dubiously lining the Warner Music coffers by squeezing millions of dollars in bogus royalties out of everyone, from TV networks to the Girl Guides of America. How I learned to ski in my 30s - and discovered the terror and joy of the mountain Nobody really likes “Happy Birthday to You.” And in Wonder’s rendition we have an excellent candidate to replace it entirely. It’s so good, in fact, that it makes you wonder what anyone is doing singing “Happy Birthday to You,” and why so many of us persist in the habit despite compelling reasons to abandon it entirely. It’s joyous and effervescent it has beds of smooth’ 80s synths and is, absurdly, almost six minutes long. Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” is extremely delightful. “Black people (me and my entire family, for instance) have been singing it at birthday parties for decades… It’s infinitely cooler and more soulful than the white thing that may have inspired it.” “Yes, the black ‘Happy Birthday’ is real,” she writes. In 2016, Aisha Harris wrote a paeon for Slate about what she simply calls “the black Happy Birthday song,” which, she discovered when she informally polled them, her white friends had almost uniformly never heard of. Aldo Grandjean 41.6K subscribers Subscribe 135K 43M views 11 years ago Artist: Stevie Wonder Song: Happy Birthday Album: Hotter Than July (EMI 1980). Indeed, black families all over America have tended to prefer “Happy Birthday” to the white-favoured “Happy Birthday to You,” defaulting to it in unison each year. Noah’s was not the only family to substitute Wonder’s ballad for the traditional. ![]()
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