Master Blaster (Jammin')

Something about this opening — the shuffle of the drums, the lifted cadence of the arrangement — announces immediately that you're in the presence of a party, but also something more complicated. Wonder wrote this as a tribute to Bob Marley, and the reggae influence runs through the entire DNA of the track, but filtered through Wonder's own harmonic sophistication and Motown-adjacent production instincts. The result is a song that feels simultaneously like a celebration and a political statement, which in 1980 was exactly what it needed to be. The horns have an almost Jamaican ska quality, punching on the offbeat with rhythmic authority, while the keyboards float over the top with characteristic Wonder warmth. His vocal performance here is among his most exuberant — there's an almost reckless joy in how he delivers these lyrics, as if he's physically incapable of containing what he feels. The lyrical content circles around music's power to transcend division, to communicate across barriers of language and politics and geography, and Wonder sings it with the authority of someone who has lived that truth. Emotionally the song generates the specific feeling of believing that joy is itself an act of resistance, that celebrating life is political when the world keeps trying to drain the joy from it. It's a morning song, a defiant song, an inclusive song that makes you feel like humanity might actually be okay.