"Living for the City" | |||||||
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Single by Stevie Wonder | |||||||
from the album Innervisions | |||||||
B-side | "Visions" | ||||||
Released | November 1973 | ||||||
Format | 7" 45 RPM | ||||||
Genre | Soul | ||||||
Length | 7:21 (Full-length version) 3:41 (Single edit) |
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Label | Tamla | ||||||
Writer(s) | Stevie Wonder | ||||||
Producer(s) | Stevie Wonder | ||||||
Stevie Wonder singles chronology | |||||||
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"Living for the City" is a 1973 single by Stevie Wonder from his Innervisions album. It reached number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number 1 on the R&B chart.Rolling Stone ranked the song number 105 on their list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
Wonder played all the instruments on the song and was assisted by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff for recording engineering and synthesizer programming. It was one of the first soul music songs to deal explicitly with systemic racism and to use everyday sounds of the street like traffic, voices and sirens which were combined with the music recorded in the studio.