Living for the City is a 1973 hit single by Stevie Wonder from his Innervisions album. It reached #8 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart and #1 on the R&Bchart. Rolling Stone ranked the song #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 synthesizerprogramming. 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. The song tells the story of a young African American man, a southern migrant, arriving in New York City. He is tricked into carrying drugs and is arrested, convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison.
Charts[]
| Country | Peak position |
|---|---|
 Germany |
20[1] |
 United Kingdom |
15[2] |
 United States |
8[3] |