A-Side: Stevie Wonder, "He's Misstra Know-It-All" (1974)
"If we had less of him / don't you know we'd have a better land?"
Oh, sure, “You Haven’t Done Nothin” gets all the love since it’s got the Jackson 5 on background vocals and also because Nixon resigned a couple days after it dropped; also it’s got that chonky, fonky Clavinet that we all love and associate with Stevie Wonder. The song is cool — it’s just a little too verbose and high-minded for my liking and has the sort of tweedy “have at you!” tenor that certain unbearable personalities bring to arguments on Twitter. Yes, that’s me bringing my contemporary baggage and brain worms to music released in the 1970s, but I can only be me!
For my money Stevie’s better protest against Nixon, though not so squarely directed at him, is to be found on the final single from Innervisions, released a year earlier: “He’s Misstra Know-It-All,” a song that’s initially quite placid and restrained but then escalates, as Stevie loses his cool, into a fusillade of s-tag insults. He’s a real menace here. You talk too much! You worry me to death! He’s absolutely scathing! The full fade-out takes more than a minute, and I get the sense that Stevie kept banging on that piano and calling Tricky Dicky a whole bitch for another half hour of recording!
These days I suppose you couldn’t drop a song like “He’s Misstra Know-It-All” (much less “You Haven’t Done Nothin”) without it getting dismissed as cringe or else lost in the mix of the total culture war. You know what? Let me end this post right now before I fuck around and give John Legend any more ideas.