Saturday, September 01, 2007

LUCIANA LOPEZ The Oregonian Staff

The word genius is vastly overused in artistic circles. Part of that is simply the music business hype machine, but it's also a hard term to define.

With Stevie Wonder, though, the artist himself has suggested one facet of genius. He called it "Innervisions" in an album that came out in 1973. Genius suggests vision, an interior universe both so sweeping and so minutely detailed that it takes the listener into another place.

Wonder, who played Thursday night at McMenamins Edgefield, has reaped praise for everything from his genre-crossing (would funk and rock have met without him?) and his vocals (deceptively simple, but actually quite difficult) to his early ripening as a musician (at 12 he was already brilliant). But it's the totality of his musical world that connects most forcefully with people, and that totality is part of what elevates his work, including Thursday's concert, into the realm of genius.

In Wonder's case, his world is one of love. Oh, sure, it's easy to dismiss that statement with a sneer. It sounds sappy. It sounds facile. But in Wonder's hands, it's true and it's genuine and it's powerful.

He began his concert by telling the audience, "First of all, I want to say I love everyone." Often, what rock stars mean by this is: "I love that you adore me, or I love that you give me millions of dollars." Stevie Wonder, however, appeared actually to mean: "I love everyone."

Of course, what makes him such a wonder is that that love entwines with his vast musical talent. The combination of the two carries huge power. "Love's in Need of Love Today," his opening song, was a gentle, real plea as applicable today as when it appeared on his 1976 album, "Songs in the Key of Life." A good song will stay good, regardless of the passage of time. The circumstances of our lives might change, but the human condition, the bedrock of our humanity, remains.

Wonder's best work furthers his vision. That's a big part of the difference between "Overjoyed" and "I Just Called to Say I Love You," both of which he played Thursday. The former is a superb song, romantic and beautiful without sentimentality; the latter has been criticized for years for being, well, overly sentimental. But "Overjoyed" also contains a fuller universe. It begins: "Over time, I've been building my castle of love/Just for two, though you never knew you were my reason." It's far more complex than "I Just Called to Say I Love You," which lacks that development of ideas and suffers by comparison.

Not to say that Wonder's world is limited: It's broad enough to encompass not only romantic and personal love but also pain and injustice. "Living for the City," an unembellished look at the circumscribed lives of the urban poor, fits as well into his vision as the sweet "My Cherie Amour."

His longtime social activism came out several times. At night's end, for example, he told the audience to vote next year for a candidate who could unite the nation. Justice can be implacable, nearly as frightening as its opposite sometimes, but Wonder's is tinged with love.

Maybe that is what artistic genius is: A world wide enough to include the whole of human experience, minute enough to engage all the human mind, perceptive enough to bring the meaningful to the fore.

Think, in literature, of the writer Edward P. Jones, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Known World." The book is nonlinear -- Jones skips around, both in its point of view and in time. "It might be that because I, as the 'god' of the people in the book, could see their first days and their last days and all that was in between . . .," he said in one interview.

Or consider the films of Akira Kurosawa, each one so meticulously filmed, so wholly realized, that the stories he tells breathe. To watch them is to feel them, to become absorbed in the world he depicts, so that they become almost part of our own lived experiences.

Wonder played for nearly two and a half hours Thursday, a marathon set by almost any standards. Age (he is 57) has not robbed him of his vocal ability; his voice retains the polished warmth and openness that marked his earliest releases.

"I'm ready to go home and get into bed and get some sleep," he said, shortly before leaving the stage. It was easy to see why he would be tired: He opened himself fully to the audience, a great gift.

Still, his presence lingered long after he left the stage. And that is genius, too: A world so full it lives on, even when its creator is not present. With luck, we will have Wonder with us for many, many more years. But his work -- that doesn't need luck to survive. That will remain longer than any of us.