Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye is credited with one of the very first records released by Motown: the second one, to be precise, "The Soulful Moods Of Marvin Gaye" from 1961. He would remain tied to the label - famous as the home of soul music smoothed out and made palatable to white audiences - for most of his career, in many ways helping to build its fortunes. Indeed, it was following the success of his first records that the label's direction shifted toward the pop sound for which it would be remembered, moving away from a project initially more focused on instrumental and experimental production.

Married to the younger sister of label boss Berry Gordy, with a gospel background he owed to his father, a Protestant preacher (the same father who would shoot and kill him on his forty-fifth birthday), and a recent past as a voice in various groups with a not-particularly-"Black" sound, Marvin Gaye also had features that weren't especially African, wasn't excessively dark-skinned, was rather tall, and had a pair of remarkably broad shoulders, thanks to which he would wear the sharp suit - de rigueur for pop musicians of the era - like no one before or since, right up to the present day.

Not bad-looking at all, and partly free of the typical physical traits that would have kept white women from finding him attractive, he also possessed one of the most composed and linear soul falsettos of the era — genuinely impressive from a technical standpoint, but above all evocative of the kind of sensations that, matched to his looks and properly stirred in the "hearts" of black and white housewives alike as they listened to the radio while washing dishes, were bound to send his songs straight to the top of the charts, both R&B and pop. Which is exactly what happened.

If his contemporary Otis Redding appears on back covers with his jacket soaked in sweat, Marvin doesn't. He even keeps his shirt cuffs buttoned. With cufflinks.

Since both his voice and his repertoire — songs about love with unmistakably erotic undertones — lent themselves well to the profitable duet trend, Gaye recorded time and again with every female voice on Motown's roster, racking up hit after hit and, over ten years of conscientious work, building himself a tidy little fortune.

A critical aside before moving on. Motown records were commercial records, in the sense that they were conceived and produced to sell. But they were, at the same time — often, and in Gaye's case almost always — of the highest quality. The singers could sing, the musicians could play, the writers could write. And they were emotionally charged and intense. You can't apply today's moral yardsticks to soul music and that era: you can't judge it by its intentions. Probably no music can be judged that way, but while other genres are debatable, soul isn't. It was undoubtedly conceived to sell (at least in the vast majority of what has survived to us) or at least to please, but just as undoubtedly it's artistically beyond reproach.

In truth, Marvin Gaye is something more than the "Love Man" of his songs. He's that too, even when he's wearing cufflinks, and it comes through in his most heartfelt, moving performances. But he's also critical-minded, relatively well-read and attentive. He keeps his eyes and ears open. Yet he also seems like a deeply tormented person. Sad and emotionally fragile. He would grow into a serious drug dependency. But above all, he's an artist — the commanding, unsettling kind, even while remaining full of tact.

In 1970, as white America wakes from its most childish dreams, the maimed come home from Vietnam (among them the singer's own brother), heroin floods the ghettos, the Black Panthers rot in prison, and Detroit — home of Motown and Gaye's own residence — rises up and burns its neighborhoods, Marvin, the presentable Black man, channels his intelligence, his awareness, his pain and his character into a self-produced, self-financed single, "What's Going On". It doesn't reach store shelves until January 1971, months after it was recorded, due to Gordy's wariness of a strange track so far removed from the Motown sound. But success is immediate. Marvin is granted a month to capitalize on it: in that short window, the label wants a finished album built around the song. And it will get one — though maybe not quite the one it expected...

Classic soul is on its way out. The seventies begin, forcefully, right there in Marvin's own backyard, in that garage/hard-rock scene from his hometown that would lead straight to punk.

He's in the studio with a considerable stash of weed, his invaluable and trusted arranger David Van DePitte, and Motown's session players — people with no patience for the superfluous, precise and essential, always working with the goal firmly in sight. Less flashy than their counterparts at Stax, but every bit as brilliant. In that one month, Marvin Gaye, while staying true to his own history and to the spirit of soul music, effectively kills off '60s Black music, in both style and form. He creates the work that, better than any other, distills the mutation of soul into funk, through injections of psychedelia and consciousness.

The LP "What's Going On" is a work of extraordinary cohesion and gorgeous invention. It's the first true soul album, conceived as a unified whole rather than a collection of singles padded out with filler. What's more: it's a concept album about the great social issues of the day — ecology, children, ghetto youth, Vietnam. Gaye is among the first Black artists to embrace an "alternative" aesthetic, tackling themes of political protest previously more the province of white audiences. But he never forgets that he's a soulman, and that he has class.

The title track, placed at the opening, with the vocal doubled via overdubs, the rhythmic bed and the sax, would become an archetype for Black music. This one song alone distills gospel spirituality, soul's rigor and emotion, and a sound of startling modernity. For its time and its genre, it's avant-garde. Today it would still sound utterly current. Marvin's voice, which had occasionally lapsed into the saccharine (though with that falsetto, how could it not...) and would do so again later, doesn't give an inch here.

The funk is already there, but the "urban" attitude that would later make its fortune is replaced by gospel. The other eight tracks all serve as an ideal continuation of this one. The jazz-indebted rhythms, the clean, flawless basslines, an almost obsessive attention to groove, and Marvin's exquisite vocal delivery combine, for the first time, to put the boundless instrumental skill and extraordinary communicative power of musicians from the "Black" school in the service of themes of unsettling depth.

There isn't a shred of rhetoric here. "Save The Children", which pleads for the saving of children, all children, wouldn't work at all as a charity-gala anthem. Because beneath its soft melody lies a pressing sense of guilt, anguish and fear. The voice never breaks; it employs means and registers opposite to those of rock, never predictable, possessed of an aesthetic value that at times transcends the lyrical content without ever diminishing it. It speaks of universal themes while rendering them tragically, unmistakably particular and intimate. There's no theatricality, nothing beyond what's strictly necessary to deliver the message.

"God Is Love", placed at the center of the album, is the record's one moment of pure joy — barely two minutes in which the old Marvin resurfaces most clearly, and in which, perhaps not entirely intentionally, he reclaims his most physical, ecstatic register. The happy accident of the doubled vocal, arrived at in the studio through overdubbing mistakes, wraps the listener in a swirl of pleading, joyful voices...

"Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)", featuring a sax phrase recorded without the saxophonist's knowledge, is one of the album's most famous moments. It's built more straightforwardly than the other tracks, with a steadier, more pop-oriented flow. Not that the rest of the album is difficult listening, but it often takes unexpected shapes, letting rhythm dominate every other element while the vocal phrasing seems to lose its coherence.

"Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" is about the ghettos and the young people living in them, and it simply needs to be heard. It's a simply perfect track: not a single note sounds dated, not even in the best sense of the word.

Marvin Gaye would have earned his place in music history even without "What's Going On". Had he never chosen to make a political statement (something he would in any case abandon on the following record, the splendid "Let's Get It On", returning to sing about love, and beginning to sing about sex, for the rest of his career), he probably would have had less penetration in the record collections of people who weren't soul fans. But while "What's Going On" is a thematically unique episode in Gaye's career, it isn't so stylistically. The works that immediately followed are, for the most part, continuations of the musical discourse he'd been pursuing since '71. With uneven inspiration, certainly, but always with clarity of intent. That's because Marvin and his never-sufficiently-credited arranger David Van DePitte were artists as bold and forward-looking as few others.

If the catalyst for the pair's creativity was, arguably, Hot Buttered Soul by Isaac Hayes, the originality and uniqueness of their work is beyond dispute.

The cover photo of Marvin, with wet hair, an unkempt beard and the raised collar of a raincoat, marks the first break from Motown soul's composed, tightly framed aesthetic — the inevitable passing, the end, even for respectable Black America, of the '60s, the awakening from the great illusion.

Gaye would, however, always remain tied to soul, because he was its quintessence. He would live through the funk epic gasping into microphones the world over, getting high, embracing pop and finally dying over a simple matter of money, but without ever losing his style, without ever renouncing his past, without trying to resemble anyone, confirming, every time he opened his mouth, even just to sing about a woman, that when your vocal cords are wired directly to your heart, no fashion or era can hold you back.

Marvin's art, even his voice alone, transcends any contingency. In April '71, in Detroit, he managed to distill his own pain and hope, and the world's, into a cohesive, well-defined, formally perfect work. What's more, the music made in those days is absolutely incorporeal, almost without timbre, pure feeling. It doesn't lose its shine with repeated listens; there are no tricks, no embellishments.

It should appeal even to the most incurable cynics, because Gaye never spoke of god without having the means and the reasons to do so. Because one cannot help but admire and respect him. Sure, 80% of the time what he calls "god" doesn't exist, but even so, as long as a man can get this close to what we call "truth", as long as a voice can become that of every stomach and body listening to it, as was the case with Marvin Gaye, we can do without a god. As long as we manage to adequately sustain the illusion of not being alone and condemned to impenetrability...

What's been said above will seem quite silly to anyone who doesn't consider a certain kind of music a serious matter. But for many people it is serious, and I believe that, listening to "What's Going On", quite a few of those many will find themselves agreeing with what's been stated here.

The album is currently available in two CD versions: the budget one pairs it, with a bare-bones booklet, with the excellent follow-up "Let's Get It On". Given that you get two masterpieces for the price of one and a half, it's a highly recommended purchase.

For the completists there's the 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, released in 2001. It's a double disc, but reasonably priced. Aside from a booklet that does the album justice, it includes the original mix of the whole LP, the one made immediately after the recording sessions and later revised, a previously unreleased instrumental version of the title track, and a 1972 concert where the entire album is performed with the running order reversed.

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29/10/2006