“Big Brother is a very powerful protest song,” Gaines told the BBC. “He said, ‘You killed all the leaders of our country…You destroyed your country.'” Wonder was describing American society that responded to social movements in the 1960s with violence and a series of political assassinations. “He clearly questions the legitimacy of the political order of the time,” Gaines said.
The early 1970s were a harrowing time for African American activists, including state repression of the Black Panthers and the murder of Black Power leaders in Chicago, and Big Brother reflects those real-life events. Wonder’s next album, Innervisions, features songs including Higher Ground, Too High, and of course one of his most influential songs, Living for the City, which vividly captures the urban landscape. A cinematic tale of the migration of black Americans from the rural South to the urban north in the 20th century, the song features spoken word interludes and is transported to the streets of New York City to the roar of bus and police sirens. The film depicts how a young black man from Mississippi becomes embroiled in the crime, drugs, and police brutality that many urban African Americans faced at the time, and remains relevant into the 21st century.
new national holiday
By 1980, when the Happy Birthday call to action was released, Wonder had become one of the country’s most important musicians, and King’s birthday became a rallying point for codifying his work, says Nelson George. “People were looking to that to honor Dr. King, his movement, and the change in America.”
However, the America of 1968, when Dr. King was murdered, was different from the America of 1980, with civil rights struggles giving way to new issues such as equal opportunity in housing and education. The newly elected Reagan administration was cool on civil rights issues, with Reagan initially expressing opposition to the idea of a national holiday, and old insinuations that Martin Luther King Jr. was a subversive communist revived, as had civil rights opponents in the 1950s.
“There were people then, and probably still are, who didn’t want black people to have the holiday,” George says. Even in the United States, many people balked at the idea of giving vacation time to the president, a government official, much less a social activist. “There were a lot of threads opposing this event,” he added.
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
