What's Going On

Marvin Gaye

album cover

Message Music on a Higher Level

In the two years before he began work on this, his magnum opus, Marvin Gaye struggled with writer's block, depression, and addiction—while still recording at a relentless pace. So when, in 1970, he announced to executives at Motown Records that he'd be producing his next album himself, he faced a degree of skepticism. No artist, not least an infirm one, rejected Hitsville's famed assembly line.

Gaye eventually prevailed, and the rest is history—What's Going On is a radical miracle of pop music, an alignment of talent and message unlike anything before or since. Using his formidable powers of seduction, Gaye spoke about the Vietnam war, conditions in the inner cities, and the environment in a way that gently led listeners to greater awareness. "Something happened with me during that period," Gaye said later. "I felt the strong urge to write music and to write lyrics that would touch the souls of men."

He did that first with the title song, which rises from the sounds of a party in progress—an emotional homecoming for a Vietnam veteran. The song acquired its distinctive sound, with several different layers of Gaye's lead vocals, through a happy studio accident: As an engineer played back a practice track he'd recorded earlier, Gaye, sitting at the piano in the famous Motown studio nicknamed the "Snakepit," began singing along, echoing and embellishing the existing vocal. His overlapping voices, locked in an urgent, internal conversation, surprised everyone in the room—and from that moment became a distinguishing feature of What's Going On.

When Motown executives heard the track, they flatly refused to release it—saying it was too political, not hit material. A standoff ensued: Gaye vowed he wouldn't do anything else for the label until "What's Going On" came out, and in January 1971, six months after it was recorded, the song was issued. It became an immediate hit, reaching the top of Billboard's soul chart and the number two position on the pop charts. Motown wanted an album to follow immediately, and during a feverish ten-day marathon, Gaye and a crew of writer/producers knocked it out, with the house rhythm section, the Funk Brothers, establishing the basic accompaniment and members of the Detroit Symphony providing the sweet, questioning strings. The album reached stores in May, and its album tracks and subsequent singles—"Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" and "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"—coalesced into one riveting whole, a commentary somehow greater than the sum of its (stellar) parts. Through these persuasive songs, Gaye took the frustrations of a heated wartime moment and made them eternal: What's Going On resonates wherever there is conflict and misunderstanding, touching the souls of men by calling to the highest within them.

Genre: R&B
Released: 1971, Motown
Key Tracks: "What's Going On," "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"
Catalog Choice: Here, My Dear
Next Stop: Stevie Wonder: Innervisions
After That: Sly and the Family Stone: There's a Riot Goin' On
Book Page: 304