An Appreciation of Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On”
Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On is a great album. Like Kind of Blue, Sgt. Pepper’s, Dark Side of the Moon, Songs in the Key of Life–level great. I can confidently say it’s the greatest album of 1971, in a year of jaw-dropping excellence in popular music. I won’t say that it’s also the greatest album since 1971, but I wouldn’t want to argue against it. Rolling Stone magazine ranks it the #1 album of all time.
The history of this high-water mark in R&B is well documented elsewhere; Ben Edmond’s Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On and the Last Days of the Motown Sound is a good place to start. Like so many other artistic masterpieces, it arose out of a cluster of personal tragedies. Gaye’s marriage had failed (and along with it, relations soured with his father-in-law Berry Gordy, who also happened to be the owner of Gaye’s record label), the IRS was on his tail, and his singing partner Tammi Terrell was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Outside of his personal troubles, the United States was riven by the Vietnam War, Civil Rights protests, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and racially motivated acts of increasing police brutality. Driven by depression and a deepening addiction to cocaine, Gaye attempted suicide in 1969.
In response to all of this darkness, Gaye pulled out of his soul an album of redemptive, ecstatic beauty. Gaye’s loose concept for the record is propelled by the point of view of a Vietnam veteran returning home to a place of injustice, corruption, and ecological decay. Gordy had built Motown records on a sunshiny philosophy of three-minute hit singles that would appeal across racial lines. Protest albums were of no interest. Neither was he interested in a record where songs transitioned into one another as a suite or featured multitracked vocals of Gaye improvising over his own lyrics. “No one wants to hear that Ella Fitzgerald shit,” Gordy reportedly said.
But Gaye took full artistic control, hired an orchestra, worked closely with an outstanding group of studio musicians, and listened intently to his own artistic muse. The result was the best-selling Motown record ever, a triumph of both art-as-commerce and art-over-commerce. There’s something genuinely transcendent about What’s Going On, and you can still hear it today. It’s a revelation to listeners coming to it for the first time now as much as it was when it appeared in May 1971. You may not know, until you give it your full attention, just how deep a groove can go, and why that groove matters. How melody is message. How harmony is unity. How honesty in a human voice needs more than one layer.
Trends and genres come and go, but it’s impossible to imagine a time — in no matter how distant a future — when people are not moved by this music.
(Originally published on the Arts Fuse, April 8, 2021)
