YMMV / Stevie Wonder

• Covered Up: "For Once in My Life" was written in 1965 and had been recorded by a number of people inside and outside of Motown^note Including Jack Soo, who went on to play Detective Yemana on Barney Miller before Wonder's 1968 take. But Stevie made one important adjustment from the other versions: he took what had been a rather schmaltzy ballad and turned it into an exuberant uptempo number.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Without any retribution for either party, "Part-Time Lover" doesn't exactly discourage adultery/cheating. It is also incredibly catchy.
• Epic Riff:
  • The main riff from "Superstition" from Talking Book, originally played by layered clavinets. By this nature, "You Haven't Done Nothin'" from Fulfillingness' First Finale is in a similar position, with a slightly different synth sound at the start.
  • The repeating bassline from "I Wish" from Songs in the Key of Life. Why yes, that is where Will Smith got the idea for Wild Wild West from!
  • The horn riff at the beginning of "Sir Duke".
  • The guitar riff from "I Was Made to Love Her".
  • The harmonica riff from "Isn't She Lovely?".
  • A rare percussive example with the locomotive rhythm on "You Haven't Done Nothin'," created by Stevie himself playing a simple tempo on the drums against a drum machine backing track.
  • The bass groove from "Higher Ground". All the Red Hot Chili Peppers did was take the original and turn it up to eleven.
  • The synth bass, backup singers, and Luther Vandross scat singing in "Part-Time Lover".
• Esoteric Happy Ending: "Part-Time Lover". The scumbag husband who cheated on his wife found out his wife has cheating on him as well, karma served! But...the music is still going peppy and happy...and their marriage is ruined...hope they didn't have kids.
• Funny Moments: During an MTV Icon special honoring Janet Jackson, Stevie Wonder appeared on stage to say a few words. When he lost his place in his speech for a moment, he sarcastically asked, "Where the cue cards at?" Everyone lost it, including Janet.
  • When Will Smith sampled Stevie's "I Wish" for the Wild Wild West theme, he had Stevie join him onstage at the MTV Movie Awards with Dru Hill. Unfortunately, after the song was over, nobody escorted Stevie offstage, so he was left sitting there until Sisqo ran back to get him.
  • At the 2016 Grammy Awards, before announcing the winner for Song of the Year, Wonder opened the envelope up for the audience to see and jokingly mocked them for not being able to read braille.
  • Casey Kasem recounted an incident when Wonder went to visit The Emotions in their dressing room backstage after a show. He inadvertently walked in on them while they were changing clothes, to which they panicked and scrambled to cover up...then they thought about it for a couple of seconds and started laughing hysterically.
• Growing the Beard: His work in The '70s, where he got complete creative control from Motown. This trope appeared in a literal sense around the same time.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A song titled "Part-Time Lover," performed by a guy who would ultimately have kids with five different women. To the King of Rhythm's credit, though, none of them were from an affair.
• Refrain from Assuming: The song is "Sir Duke", not "You Can Feel It All Over".
• Retroactive Recognition: Stevie's long-time session guitarist Michael Sembello would go on to have a massive solo hit with "Maniac".
• Sampled Up:
  • More than a few young Will Smith fans in the late '90s/early '00s did double takes when they heard that the killer hook on "Wild Wild West" in "I Wish".
  • The tune from "Pastime Paradise" will get plenty of Gen-Xers to start singing Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise (and just as many smart-asses singing "Amish Paradise").
• Seasonal Rot: General consensus among audiences is that the quality of Wonder's material sharply dropped after the start of the '80s. While Hotter Than July is often ranked as part of his golden age, it's also widely viewed as a noticeable step down from Songs in the Key of Life and as the beginning of the end, while the soundtrack album to The Woman in Red is often seen as marking a contentious shift into easy listening fare with much less impactful messages after several widely acclaimed progressive soul albums. Wonder's following material would only continue to draw lukewarm responses from fans, and while his later output still sold well, most people will readily acknowledge that his best years as a songwriter are well behind him.
• Signature Song: "Superstition"; it's on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time for a good reason.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" sounds a lot like Len Barry's "1-2-3", which was a hit a few months earlier in 1965; the two song's intros especially are quite similar. This is an interesting case of Motown doing a knockoff of a song that was already a knockoff of the Motown sound.^note In fact, they sued Barry and his collaborators, claiming that "1-2-3" plagiarized "Ask Any Girl" by The Supremes, the B-Side of "Baby Love".
• Values Dissonance: In "Black Man" when a class of children are listing various historical figures, Native American men and Asian men are referred to as "red men" and "yellow men", respectively. While no one would've really cared back when the song was recorded in 1976, such terms would definitely be considered racially insensitive today.

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