Songoftheday 9/27/15 - Oh things are gettin' real funky down at the old corral, and it's not the skunks that are stinkin' it's the stinkin' lies you tell...

"Skeletons" - Stevie Wonder
from the album Characters (1987)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #19 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 7

Today's Song of the Day comes from Motown legend Stevie Wonder, who by the mid eighties was still going strong on the pop charts, scoring a #1 hit with his 1985 single "Part Time Lover", as well as being a featured artist on the biggest single of 1986, Dionne Warwick's "That's What Friends Are For". The following year, Wonder released his twenty-first studio album Characters. Decidedly more experimental in sound and lyrical content than his middle-of-the-road (MOR) pop/soul mid-80s work, the album brought the unfiltered funk back, as proven by the first single, "Skeletons". With a vibe reminding me of his 70s classic "You Haven't Done Nothin'", the song was more personal in nature, exposing the hypocrisy in the "good life" in the Reagan era that hid a closetful of sins. The video, starring Oscar-winning actress Karen Black (Great Gatsby), did set me off a little for portraying one of the "hidden demons" as a man who crossdresses, but hey, it's friggin' 1987. Meanwhile, the extended version was much more political, hitting up Oliver North and Reagan himself in their lies...

While "Skeletons" topped the R&B chart in Billboard magazine for a couple of weeks, it stopped just making the top-20 on the pop chart in America in December of 1987. The extended version climbed to #20 on their Dance Club Play list as well (the entire Characters album peaked at #3 on that same chart). The single also made the top-40 in New Zealand and Belgium, while stopping down at #59 in Britain and just missing the top-40 at #43 in Canada. I think sadly that the veer away from the too-safe material he's been doing and politically-charged lyrics turned off some radio, which is sad because this is one of his best of the decade.

The song would be Wonder's most recent to make the top-40 pop chart in the U.S. His next single from the album, the ballad "You Will Know", also topped the R&B list and reached #16 on the adult contemporary (or 'easy listening') chart. The third, his collaboration with then-red-hot Michael Jackson, "Get It", surprisingly stalled down at #80 in America, though it made the top-40 in the UK at #37. In 1988, Wonder appeared on Julio Iglesias' single "My Love", which landed him at #5 on the British chart (the song also stopped at #80 in the US). The fourth single from Characters, "My Eyes Don't Cry", gave Wonder his latest club hit that same year at #12. He waited another four years for his next project, the soundtrack to the Spike Lee movie Jungle Fever, which rewarded him with three top-10 R&B hits in 1991 with "Gotta Have You" scaling to #3 and "These Three Words" so far his most recent top-10 soul single at #7. In 1997, Wonder returned to the British top-10 as a featured guest on Babyface's "How Come, How Long" (UK #10). After a ten-year break between studio albums, Stevie came back in 2005 with A Time For Love, which was a top-5 album in America and popped him back on to the charts with "So What The Fuss" featuring En Vogue and Prince, which went to #96 pop, #34 R&B, and #40 adult contemporary (and #19 in the UK). The follow-up, "From The Bottom Of My Heart", came in at #25 on the adult contemporary list, as "Shelter In The Rain" was so far his last R&B hit in 2006 at #93.

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Here's Stevie performing the track live in Japan in 1988...

And finally, the extended version for the clubs, which have the Reagan and North clips...

Up tomorrow: A soulful British rock vet resurrects a girl, one day at a time.