Songfacts®:

• Big Brother is the overlord in George Orwell's classic novel 1984, a story of a world where citizens are constantly monitored and forced to comply, awash in a stream of propaganda trying to convince them the government knows what's best.
  
  This song is Stevie Wonder's take on the story, which comes from a historical perspective. Wonder enjoyed learning about history in school, and was struck by how advanced civilizations inevitably collapsed. He saw how this could happen in America.
  
  "I speak of the history, the heritage of the violence, or the negativeness of being able to see what's going on with minority people," he told Rolling Stone in 1973. "Seemingly it's going to continue to be this way. Sometimes unfortunately violence is a way things get accomplished. 'Big Brother' was something to make people aware of the fact that after all is said and done, that I don't have to do nothing to you, meaning the people are not power players. We don't have to do anything to them 'cause they're gonna cause their own country to fall."
• Stevie Wonder was 22 when he released this song on his album Talking Book. By then Motown Records had granted him total freedom, so he spent lots of time in the studio with two brilliant engineers, Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, who built him a custom synthesizer. Cecil would sometimes read to Wonder, and he read him parts of 1984.
  
  According to Margouleff, Wonder came in one day and said he had a new song. "It's not another love song, is it?" Cecil asked.
  
  "No, I wrote about Big Brother," he replied.
  
  Margouleff told the New York Times: "The real essence of what drove me toward Stevie, and the really deeply emotional commitment that lasts even to this day, is his political sensibility and his real understanding of the Black condition. Really, we need more Stevie Wonders today."
• Wonder did all the singing and played all the instruments on this song, including Clavinet, harmonica, drums, and Moog bass.