For a certain subset of younger Gen Xers and older Millennials, the opening riff to Stevie Wonder’s “Pastime Paradise”—from his 1976 magnum opus Songs in the Key of Life—will set off a Proustian reverie for a time when the track provided the base sample to Coolio’s 1995 one-hit-wonder “Gangsta’s Paradise”—which at this point has largely been overshadowed by the Weird Al 1996 parody “Amish Paradise”.

Yet even granting all due respect to both these nostalgic old ‘90s tracks (without either of which, “Pastime Paradise” likely would’ve passed into deep-cut obscurity, remembered only by an even older cadre of aging ‘70s Soul obsessives), such a legacy does not give all due credit to the haunting power of the Stevie Wonder original.

The melancholy, minor-key vibe of the backing track comes from the fact that lyrically, the song is about people stuck reminiscing on the past. “They’ve been spending most their lives/Living in a pastime paradise,” he repeatedly sings in the opening refrains; and, just in case too many people miss his point, he finishes these opening repetitions by spelling out for the listener, “Glorifying days long gone behind/They’ve been wasting most their days/In remembrance of ignorance oldest praise.”

But what’s so wrong with remembering the past? Should we not be learning from history? Are not memories of days gone by one of the last consolations of the elderly? Oh, but it’s not the remembering itself that Stevie Wonder critiques here, but the ignorant and uncritical celebration of the same: that all-too-human tendency to romanticize the past through rose-colored glasses, pining for the worst parts of history as though they weren’t so bad after all, simply because they were the norm when we were young, and we all miss how uncomplicated the world seemed when we were still young ourselves.

And what things in particular? Stevie Wonder catalogues:

“Dissipation, race relations
Consolation, segregation
Dispensation, Isolation, exploitation
Mutilation, mutations, miscreation
Confirmation, to the evils of the world…”

A comedian whose name I forget once said something to the effect of: if you are a black person with a time-machine, you really can’t travel back any further than, say, 1980. You have to be from a blindered, blinkered, privileged demographic indeed to pine for the past—to say with a straight face that we need to make things great again—when the past was so riddled with such evils indeed. For tens of millions of Americans especially, the era of “segregation”, and all its ensuing “exploitation,” as well as of the “mutilations” that came of the lynchings and forced sterilizations of the eugenics era, are all horrible things to romanticize indeed.

Christ it was (and God is cited frequently on this classic old double-album) who said “Let the dead bury their dead.” I’ll admit that passage has long troubled me—is it not part of our baptismal covenants to “mourn with those that mourn”?—unless what He’s referring to is to not actually requiring physical corpses to bury the dead, but that we must cease to seek in the dead-and-buried past the better things of the Kingdom. (Christ it was, too, who said to never put old wine in new bottles.)^[1]Matthew 9:17

Indeed, to seek the coming of the Kingdom of God means almost definitionally that we must look to the future instead; hence why we were instructed via revelation to name ourselves the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to encourage us to instead look forward to our latter end—and Stevie Wonder seems to intuit the same.^[2]In this regard, just as the backing track provided the sample for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” in 1995, so too did the sentiments behind these lyrics inform the video for … Continue reading

For in the very next verse, he switches it up to instead sing of, “They’ve been spending most their lives/Living in a future paradise,” contrasting those swelling miserably in the past against the happy state of those awaiting the day when the earth shall receive again its paradasaical glory: “They’ve been looking in their minds/For the day that sorrows gone from time/They keep telling of the day/When the savior of love will come to stay.”

We, too, are supposed to be anxiously awaiting the time when “The Savior of love”—for per Moroni 7:48, if we have charity, we shall be like him, for he is full of love—will “come to stay” and rule and reign upon this earth at last; when there shall be no more sorrow indeed, for “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away”^[3]Revelations 21:4.

Stevie Wonder further contrasts the happy state of those who await on the Savior in the future against those who wallow in their sins in the past, declaring that the fruits of the former include:

“Proclamation, of race relations
Consolation, integration
Verification of revelations
Acclamation, world salvation
Vibrations, stimulation
Confirmation, to the peace of the world…”

By their fruits ye shall know them indeed! When the resurrected Savior visited the ancient Americas, 4 Nephi informs us that there were no more Nephites nor Lamanites nor “any manner of -ites,” just as there were no more rich nor poor, bond nor free, but they were “all made free,” and equal partakes of the heavenly gift. Such, implicitly, is the heavenly integration we will all look forward to when the resurrected Savior returns to us all—and therefore what we need to be actively preparing for in the meantime.

For we have not been so preparing, have we. The Church in 1976 when this song came out was still practicing a wholly unscriptural racist Priesthood ban that institutionally we dragged our feet on abandoning far longer than we should have; for because certain church presidents had made this mistake in the past, we were loath to leave it in the past—we would not let the dead bury their dead. The sheer number of latter-day saints even today who kept voting to make America great “again,” indicates that far too many of us still languish in the past, constantly yearning for some “pastime paradise” that never was, and that keeps us spiritually stunted—which of course is just another term for damned, and that quite literally, for we have refused to repent.

Stevie Wonder, then, concludes his sermon (for not just this song, but the album entire, is a sermon indeed) by calling upon us to choose ye this day whom ye will serve^[4]Joshua 24:15, inviting us to: “Let’s start living our lives/Living for the future paradise,” while in turn declaring “Shame to anyone’s lives/Living in the pastime paradise.” Sentiments as true today even they were first sung in 1976–or when they were first expressed by the Savior of the World a full 2,000 years ago and counting.