Racism, police brutality, riots, war, unemployment, disasters, environmental crisis: you could be forgiven for thinking What’s Going On is a record of our times in the 2020s.
But no, it’s a Motown musical masterpiece created in the first year of the 1970s — a landmark album that had a huge impact on many of us, changed the way we experienced music, expanded our horizons, and maybe even saved us. If music was Marvin Gaye’s pulpit, then this record was his ultimate sermon.
Over half a century later and Gaye’s classic work is once again an all too pertinent soundtrack in this post-pandemic world: police murders, the ‘second coming’ of an unhinged maniac in the White House and a bunch of feckless amateurs in Downing Street. It’s as if somehow somewhere Marvin Gaye knew what we would be up against.
The years running up to the release of What’s Going On were full of political upheaval and of personal turmoil for Marvin Gaye. Only three years earlier, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis as calls for civil rights turned into chants of Black Power.
The social unrest of the late 1960s had a huge impact on Detroit — home of the chartbusting Motown label Marvin was signed with. The conflict in Vietnam was raging, anti-war and civil rights protests were polarising the country, and a crooked pre-Watergate Republican president Richard Nixon was up to no good in the Oval Office.
With all that turmoil and upheaval as a backdrop, What’s Going On was a deeply personal album for Gaye, and represented something of a turning point. Despite his impressive repertoire of hit singles in the Sixties, the singer was in a dark place as he sought to break free from both the assembly-line chug at Motown that had grown increasingly stifling.
As was the case with scores of major artists, the relationship between artist and label was contentious yet fruitful; gritty uptempo songs like Can I Get A Witness and a cover of Gladys Knight’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine were hits, but they undermined Gaye’s original dream to be a balladeer in the mould of Nat King Cole. At loggerheads with the company’s sales execs, not only did he crave artistic independence but he was struggling emotionally and financially.
Gaye was also mourning the loss of Tammi Terrell, his collaborator on such classics as Ain’t No Mountain High Enough and You’re All I Need To Get By, who had died of a brain tumour at 24. But in his depressive state there were a number of other struggles even closer to home: his burgeoning cocaine addition, being hounded by the IRS over his tax affairs, and a fractious, failing marriage to Anna Gordy — daughter of his label boss Berry — which would soon end.
At that moment in time, Marvin Gaye’s life embodied the title of a song he would go on to record and what it meant in all senses of the word: Trouble Man. A troubled soul throughout his career, in fact.
With no light at the end of that long tunnel, Marvin attempted suicide, only a timely intervention prevented it; he considered trying out for the Detroit Lions though players he knew advised him against it. Gaye seemed spent, despondent. He took all that frustration, sorrow, and brokenness, and transformed them into one of the most beautiful, soulful and deeply human albums of all time.
Musically, Gaye’s tenth studio album is a stunning tour de force, and the undoubted peak of his artistry. The music is elegiac and evocative, filled with lush, sweeping string arrangements but also packed with a gorgeous groove courtesy of the Funk Brothers, boasting basslines that are funky without being trashy, and a veritable smorgasbord of subtle, enveloping guitar licks.
But the real star is Marvin. His lyrics are poignant, reflective and introspective, as he pours his heart and soul into every word. With those soaring angelic vocals that are both transcendent and luminescent Gaye puts his incredible vocal range to work in each song, switching from sultry and smooth to pure anguish as needed. It’s obviously an album that builds on everything that came before.
trangely, What’s Going On is a record whose opening “notes” aren’t notes at all. The first sounds you hear are a busy array of speaking voices, but they aren’t of uprisings or demonstrations, but rather a happening social festivity (“This is a groovy party, man!”), making the listener feel like he’s just walked into someone’s home.
Marvin’s choice to emphasise humanity at its most charitable rather than paint a bleaker picture of destruction and disillusionment is characteristic of the album that follows. Gaye’s observer role is bemused rather than indignant, grounded instead of judgmental. And so, befitting a social ethnographer, the titles of the first couplet of songs sound like questions, even if they aren’t used as such in the chorus.
And once the music begins, with its soaring strings carrying along the master’s smooth-or-straining singing, you hear another strange touch: the vocal is double-tracked, but one track lags behind the other. You hear his voice twice, either for emphasis — or to introduce a sense of discord, a tension, into a song that remains evocative listening thanks to Gaye’s God-given talent, convincingly conveyed through his sweeping sentimentality and velvety falsetto.
The titular opening track, What’s Going On sees Gaye suggesting to “father” and “mother” (not so much literal parental figures, but rather symbols of authority and the status quo) that “war is not the answer, ‘cause only love can conquer hate.” Its powerful yet amorphous debate with the powers that be segues directly into the camaraderie sob-song of What’s Happening Brother, in which Gaye assumes the role of a Vietnam veteran.
Loosely based on the return from service of Gaye’s own brother, Frankie, who’s come home only to discover his city and country riven with segregation and urban decay, the narrator asks an old friend where the scene is as he tries to make sense of all of the chaos and corruption surrounding him. The man’s disconnect from American pop culture has left him feeling disturbed, displaced and discombobulated: poverty, pollution, pickets, protests, you name it and he’ll articulate it. Gaye would later add that
“I felt that I had to write about Vietnam, because the brutality was so extreme. I knew that this record could in no way be light-hearted. It had to be a concept album. At first I fought against that notion because the concept I had of America back then was so dark. The concept was depressing and, to be honest, I was seriously depressed.”
There’s a poignantly sad irony to “Father, father, we don’t need to escalate,” given that Marvin would eventually fall at the hands of his own father after an argument. Then there’s that deliciously defiant line — “Who are they to judge us/Simply ’cause our hair is long?” — a reference to the hippie peace movement that’s a small example of the sort of universal humanity conveyed in these songs.
The insurgent subject matter was reflected in a change in Gaye’s appearance: he stopped wearing ties and grew a beard. “Black men weren’t supposed to look overtly masculine,” he told his biographer David Ritz: “I’d spent my entire career looking harmless, and the look no longer fit. I wasn’t harmless. I was pissed at America.”
With its plaintive cries for help, Save The Children sees the singer at his most repulsed (“Think of the children”), which makes the gorgeous awakening of God Is Love all the more convincing. Literally, it’s about as rapturous as music gets, as Gaye sings, in that haunting, soothing voice of his, “When we call on Him for mercy, mercy Father/He’ll be merciful, my friend”. Wth the additional presence of a dozen gospel choir members, listening to it over five decades later the tune becomes well nigh a religious experience that’s as poignant now as then without ever stooping to preachiness.
As a concept album that is best consumed as a whole, What’s Going On was a tremendous shift. With admirable resolve, Gaye turned away from the tried-and-true topic of love and lust and embarked on a concerted songwriting binge as he focused his pen on social issues that occupied the headlines of the day, writing or co-writing every track on the record. And decades before the environment would become a hot topic for Hollywood heavyweights, he authored possibly the most beautiful R&B song ever created on the subject of Mother Nature.
Listening to the magnificent mix of Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology) in 2026 and you realise that Gaye was prophetically asking many of the questions that have been — however belatedly — preoccupying the thoughts of so many across the globe, from Michigan to Moscow, Minnesota to Manchester. What would become the set’s second single and million-selling chart-topping R&B hit, the track is a sorrowful requiem to a planet in disarray and on the verge of environmental destruction.
Happier/happily, Mercy found a new audience again in the early 90s when Motown released a newly created music video for the song’s 20th anniversary. Featuring a roll-call of engaged performers including Bobby Brown (What?, no Whitney?), Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and David Bowie — the latter, almost a “token whitey” in the clip, would go on to reference What’s Going On two years later on his Black Tie White Noise single with new jack swinger Al B. Sure!.
Mind you, this was one Marvin Gaye album almost didn’t happen at all. Originally scheduled for release in 1970, the vinyl made it to the pressing plant only after a long and acrimonious battle with Tamla Motown’s head honcho Berry Gordy and his marketing minions, who were struggling to adapt and concede that the label’s “Sound of Young America” was in need of desperate change.
After hearing a preliminary mix of What’s Going On — which stayed locked in the vaults until a 40th anniversary box set in 2011 — the CEO refused to release the record. With commercial ventures paramount, Gordy had always emphasised mainstream entertainment values when deciding what to release, and the famed Quality Control Department at Motown examined lyrics for anything that might be deemed controversial.
As the airwaves filled with songs that reflected the mixed-up state of the world (White Rabbit, Taxman, Street Fighting Man), the company only allowed a few politically conscious “protest songs” to be made public, such as Stevie Wonder’s decidedly polite take on Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In the Wind (1966), or the bleeding-heart impassioning of Heaven Help Us All (1970).
With its unabashedly passive advocacy for peace and love, Gordy wasn’t necessarily offended by Gaye’s embrace of countercultural politics. No, what really offended his sensibilities (and caused him to infamously tell Motown’s VP of sales, Barney Ales, “This is the worst record I’ve ever heard!”) was, bizarrely, its coruscating cohesiveness as an album.
Unashamedly king of his conveyor belt philosophy, Berry was the enterprise’s founder who ran the hit factory as if it lived and died by the 45. But with What’s Going On its star performer presented to Motown what might be considered the label’s first concept album. At the very least, it was a groundbreaking experiment in collating a pseudo-classical suite of seamlessly segued free-flowing music, with the first half-dozen offerings arguably about as perfect a run of songs as it’s possible to get.
Of course, when all was said and done, Gordy ended up eating crow with his caviar, as What’s Going On gained rave reviews. Even better, after ten years of trying Gaye finally scored his first ever top ten LP on the Billboard pop charts. In a matter of months, the project spawned a trio of massive hit singles, with third 45, the anguished bawl of Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler), marking an unprecedented three R&B chart-toppers from the same album. The song closes out the record and, hammering the point home, melts into a final, funereal reprise of the title track.
It goes without saying that Gaye’s social consciousness should not be downplayed, either; it should, in fact, be celebrated, for its relative novelty at the time and for the musical skill with which he advanced it. What’s Going On was the first long-player after Sly And The Family Stone’s Stand! to attempt to challenge and illuminate the political mood of the era.
And a disturbing update on the state of things as it was. The candid blend of sorrow and awareness of injustice gave the set an invigorating sense of immediacy. But coming as it did a few long hard years after the ‘love’ movement had peaked and deflated in the face of ongoing indifference and hostility, it has an understandably mournful tone.
One gets the overriding sense that a spirit as seemingly resilient as a cash-cow “celebrity” like Marvin Gaye’s can crumble in the face of encroaching urban despair. But it would be a mistake to interpret What’s Going On as simply an angry cry from the inner city. It is that, aye, but also much more: a truly heartfelt cry for compassion, for sympathy, for common understanding, and, above all, for love. Indeed, it’s all over the album, kicking off on the immortal title track, where Gaye practically begs, “We have got to find a way/to bring some loving here today.”
The soldier, struggling to find work for himself, nonetheless finds time to look at the chaos around him and ask, “When will people start getting together again?” As the world has weathered isolation, inequality and endless political protest, it’s a question that feels enormously resonant right now.
Marvin may have departed to that great Hitsville in the sky, but What’s Going On has only gained in stature since its release, and remains largely untouched in the canon of great pop landmarks. When Rolling Stone asked “271 artists, producers, industry executives and journalists to pick the greatest albums of all time” in 2003, What’s Going On landed at number six, making it the only entry by an African-American artist to crack the top ten. Then in 2020 the same magazine declared What’s Going On was actually the best album of all time. Of course, rankings are entirely subjective but it’s hard to deny its immense lyrical and musical merit, not to mention its constant political and cultural relevance.
And guess what? America is still in a hard place, as is the world. It can often seem crass, cruel and pitiless, and much of our struggles seem to have arisen from the feeling that too few of Marvin Gaye’s concerns have been addressed in 55 years. We could use some of the things he called for today. With a little luck, and a little lurve, maybe the Master could still help us get through to better things to come.
We shall overcome? We’ve got to find a way.
Steve Pafford
Sources: National Review, Slant Magazine, Opuszine
