Song of the Day 7/18: Stevie Wonder, “I Wish”

Trump tried to bury the Epstein List controversy, and it almost worked. He made a few phone calls and every right-wing news source dropped all discussion of it. (Yesterday, while most of the media breathlessly reported the Wall Street Journal’s letter from Trump to Epstein, Fox played a segment on “Biden’s Greatest Gaffes.”)

The conspiracy-hungry public won’t go without, though. For some reason the internet resurrected the years-old rumors that Stevie Wonder isn’t blind, prompting Wonder to issue a non-denial denial – he addressed it from stage and said only, “You know the truth.”

Celebrities have been telling anecdotes about this on talk shows for years; the clips are all over YouTube. Shaquille O’Neal often tells of the time Stevie got in an elevator that Shaq was already in. Shaq didn’t say anything but Stevie nodded at him and said, “What’s up, Shaq?” There are several other anecdotes of this sort, the gist being not that Wonder is fully sighted, just that he’s not totally blind, as commonly believed.

Wonder was born prematurely, and the oxygen-rich environment of the incubator caused retinopathy of prematurity, in which abnormal blood vessels grow in the retina. In severe cases, the retina detaches, causing total blindness, but in other cases patients retain some vision. Is it possible that Wonder case see, say, light and dark and make out shapes? Sure, but what difference does it make?

If somebody wants to make a proper conspiracy theory out of this, they’ll have to dig through his songs for evidence. Consider this line from “I Wish,” the lead single from his 1976 double-LP, “Songs in the Key of Life”:

Smokin’ cigarettes and writing something nasty on the wall

Aha! What’s a blind guy doing writing on a wall? What more proof do you need? (That’s his sister scolding him). “I Wish” became the fourth No. 1 single of Wonder’s career; he eventually had three more. It also won him a Grammy for best R&B vocal performance.