Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | link |
| BBC Online | (favorable) link |
| Billboard | (favorable) link |
| Robert Christgau | (A) |
| Q | link |
| Rhapsody | (favorable) link |
| Rolling Stone | (favorable) 1973 |
| Rolling Stone | 2004 |
| Virgin Encyclopedia | link |
| Yahoo! Music | (favorable) |
Released after Wonder toured with the Rolling Stones in 1972, Talking Book became an immediate hit. The popular appeal of the recording helped destroy the myth that R&B artists were incapable of creating music that could be appreciated by rock audiences, and marked a unique period for R&B artists (especially Motown artists).
Talking Book peaked at #3 on the Pop Albums chart, and became the first album for Wonder to top the Top R&B Albums chart where it remained for three weeks.
Wonder won three awards for Talking Book at the 1974 Grammys: Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "You Are the Sunshine of My Life", and both Best Male R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B Song for "Superstition". Incidentally, at the same ceremony, Wonder's next album, Innervisions, won Album of the Year and Talking Book's producers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff won the Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical award for their work on that album.
In 2003, the album was ranked number 90 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Read more about this topic: Talking Book
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
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