"Living for the City" is a social-justice epic compressed into four minutes of funk. Stevie Wonder recorded it in 1973 as a narrative about a young man who leaves his Mississippi home for New York City, hoping for opportunity, and finds only the same traps in a different location. The song follows him step by step -- the bus ride, the arrival, the arrest, the conviction. Stevie understood that the journey from hope to disillusionment is the same story told in every city. The details change. The pattern does not.