This Week's "Oldie But Goodie": "You Haven't Done Nothin'" by Stevie Wonder
Still relevant 50 years later.
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Released 50 years ago, in August 1974, "You Haven't Done Nothin" was the first single released from Stevie Wonder’s Grammy Award winning album Fulfillingness' First Finale. Sometimes described as one of Wonder’s “angriest political statements”, the song was aimed at then President Richard Nixon who was in the midst of the Watergate scandal. Nixon resigned two days after the song was released as a single.
Shortly after Nixon's resignation, Wonder issued this statement:
Everybody promises you everything but in the end, nothing comes out of it. I don't vote for anybody until after they have really done something that I know about. I want to see them do something first. The only trouble is that you always hear the president or people say that they are doing all they can. And they feed you with hopes for years and years. I'm sick and tired of listening to all their lies.
Entertainment journalist Jeremy Helligar described the song as a “scathing political recrimination” that “helped shape the politics of Hip-Hop”.
But we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Tellin' how you are gonna change right from wrong
'Cause if you really want to hear our views
You haven't done nothin'
The Jackson 5, with a 15 year-old Michael Jackson, sing the "Doo da wop!" backup vocals on the song.
The video below is Stevie Wonder’s performance of the song at the 1975 Grammy Award show.
The Recording Academy made the following comments about the performance:
Still in the middle of one of the greatest GRAMMY rolls of all-time, the magnificent Stevie Wonder had everyone in the audience, from Marvin Hamlisch to the Pips, clapping in time to perhaps his most political and angry masterpiece ever, “You Haven’t Done Nothin’”—a song that spoke powerfully to the climate of the mid-’70s in the inner cities.