Stevie Wonder Gets Gershwin Prize, Hopefully Won’t Eat It

Stevie Wonder is easily one of our most important performers, having written songs for Martin Luther King, Sesame Street and the Abi Titmuss sex tape.

And that’s probably the reason why the US Library of Congress has decided to bestow Stevie Wonder with one of its highest honours, the Gershwin Prize. The Gershwin Prize is either an award to recognise an artist’s lifelong ability to foster mutual understanding through music, or just something they give to people who’ve spent the last decade eating so much food that they’re now starting to resemble giant fleshy beanbags.

Frankly it could be either one of those. And whichever one it isn’t, someone needs to invent it and give to Stevie Wonder as well. He’s equally brilliant at both, you see. And, no, that’s not because he’s blind. Your bigotry offends us sometimes, it really does.

If American Idol audition song choices are a barometer of success, then Stevie Wonder is truly a giant among men. Obviously, though, they aren’t a barometer of anything - if they were then Anastacia would be rich enough to gold-plate Australia and we’d all be walking around with the words ‘Celine Dion! Woo!’ tattooed across our foreheads - but you get the idea.

Stevie Wonder is still culturally relevant. Every time Stevie Wonder pops up at the Grammy, surprises everyone with how fat he’s getting, rambles on about nothing and then honks into his mouth organ like he bloody invented them, it’s because he’s culturally relevant. Every time Stevie Wonder wades into the current political scene, it’s because he’s culturally relevant. And every time Stevie Wonder declares that Jesus killed John Lennon, it’s because - yes - he’s culturally relevant.

And that’s why Stevie Wonder has been named as the recipient of The US Library of Congress’ Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Since Stevie Wonder is only the second artist to receive the award, and since Paul Simon was the first, we assume that the Gershwin Prize exists to recognise artists who used to be quite good but then went inexplicably shit. Or, as Reuters puts it:

Librarian of Congress James Billington said the Gershwin Prize was set up to commemorate George and Ira Gershwin, the American songwriting team whose manuscript collections reside in the Library of Congress. He said the prize honors musicians for a lifetime of contributions to the field of popular music that helped bring diverse listeners together and fostered mutual understanding.

It’s hard to overstate the prestige of winning a prize like this - a distinguished panel of scholars and experts has effectively ruled that the music of Stevie Wonder is some of the most important ever written. That’s quite a compliment for a man who once wrote a song called Power Flower.

However, it’s important that you don’t get the US Library of Congress’ Gershwin Prize confused with the other vaguely political cultural awards, the Kennedy Centre Honours. For winning the Gershwin Prize, Stevie Wonder gets to compose a brand-new piece of music that will be preserved forever in the library, whereas if he’d won a Kennedy Centre Honour then Jessica Simpson would have just buggered up one of his songs in front of him and ran off crying. Big difference.