The greatest pop singer in history, according to Yusuf / Cat Stevens
There is a sweet transcendence to the music of Yusuf / Cat Stevens. For the folk musician, songs are a spiritual vessel, not a conduit to the Hot 100.
Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped him from landing five tracks in the UK top ten over the years and nine albums to boot. There is a beauty to his work that proves difficult to place but has never been anything short of utterly soothing and massively appealing as a result.
As he said of the ethereal appeal of music himself: “It’s a mystical thing still. I mean, we can’t put it on this sort of laboratory table and examine it. It’s something which permeates our emotions and our soul. Sometimes our intellect, our body moves to it. I mean, there’s so many things. But for me, music was a vehicle.”
His tracks are often ones that stick with you, like little signposts on memory lane, mystic in the sense that they seem like fated findings rather than considered creations. When he performs live, that imposing notion of craft and spontaneous expression colliding is startlingly profound. ‘Father and Son’ at the right point of a festival could even move a young Scrooge to tears.
Behind his honed art is a vast wealth of inspiration. He has been shaped by everything from West Side Story to The Beatles, Ali Farka Touré, Nina Simone, and the voice he dubs the sweetest of them all: Stevie Wonder. Like Stevens himself, Wonder sees music as a spiritual beast. This sentiment developed profoundly for both artists at a similar time.
Stevens needed to take a two-year hiatus from the industry while recovering from TB, during which he drifted towards musical obscurity. This was exacerbated by a break-up with Warhol Factory actor Patti D’Arbanville and the increasing presence of substances in his life. The voice of Stevie Wonder helped to see him through, which is why he ranked him as the greatest vocalist of all time in a Rolling Stone poll.
At the same time, Wonder was also searching for further depths in his music. Wonder, bafflingly, was only 21 when his 1971 record, Where I’m Coming From, was released, and yet somehow it was his 13th studio album.
His prolific childhood output is symptomatic of the way that Motown worked. Gordy recognised that the key to his label’s success was dominating the radio waves, and as such, he instilled in his artists a need to churn out a constant stream of radio-friendly singles. The result of this practice was so productive and precise in its gold-plated excellence that it spawned a genre title of its own.
The issue, of course, is that a hit single has to appeal to the masses, it has to be succinct, and it most certainly has to be radio-friendly. In the process, the Motown juggernaut squashed creative individualism by making artists seem like they were part of some corporate, hit-churning machine.
Owing to a clause in Wonder’s contract, he was able to void the condition of Motown’s strict creative control when he became a legal adult on his 21st birthday in 1971. He seized upon this opportunity and never looked back. He left his contract and made music that moved people, people like Cat Stevens in dire need, in an entirely different way.
So, for the folk star who would become Yusuf, the brilliance of Wonder’s music is in the way he used his voice in both senses. Little wonder that Bob Dylan calls Stevie Wonder pop’s only true “genius”, and Paul McCartney backed him up by also labelling the ‘Superstition’ singer a “genius”.
But as for Wonder, it is all entirely natural. He puts his art down to a simple passionate expression, commenting, “You will never feel proud of your work if you find no joy within it; your best work is always joyful work.” That sentiment resounds in his stirring work, elevating his chops with a humanity that goes beyond expert musicality.
