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What’s Going On

What’s Going On has been a go-to album for me for decades. I put it on when life feels fragmented and directionless. Other albums do this work, too, although in different ways. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is one. Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty is another. Less well known and more recent, Lydia Loveless’s Indestructible Machine also fires those cylinders. They are albums wherein the whole exceeds the sum of the parts.

Bob Dylan’s music can reorient me as well, particularly in blending the prophetic and the poetic. Gaye’s album does this too, more than Morrison’s, Browne’s, or Loveless’s, which are more individualistic. Gaye’s blend of beauty and exhortation, personal pain and social vision, is one of the album’s signal achievements.

Listen to a YouTube playlist of the album’s original 9 tracks, in order, here.

This page has links to lyrics for each song.

Although it’s not a murder ballad, What’s Going On belongs in our larger conversation about musical responses to violence. You may find it a stretch to discuss it here, but violence and its etymological sibling “violation” are symptoms of the crisis central to the album. As we’ll shortly see, its spark was a violent confrontation over war, placing it well within our ambit.

Gaye doesn’t invoke a specific murder or tell a story in a straightforward way. He doesn’t name names, but puts broad themes and issues into a framework of personal relationships—brothers, mothers, fathers, sisters, friends—that are both particular and universal. The songs’ conversations about “what’s going on” take place among friends, with a party in the background. He transforms deeply-felt, personal response to war, violence, and social dislocation into a 35-minute odyssey that indicts, heals, and empowers.

The direct references to violence in What’s Going On are few: “Brother, there’s far too many of you dying” in the title track; and “Crime is increasing, Trigger happy policing” mentioned in the concluding track “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).” “What’s Going On” (the song) doesn’t specify whether too many are dying in Vietnam at war or dying back at home. By the end of the album, though, Gaye convinces you not to separate the two. They represent part of the same social and spiritual crisis. This crisis forms the wellspring of What’s Going On’s cri de coeur.

War is not the answer

Obie Benson, of The Four Tops, drafted the original version of the title song. Benson wrote it after witnessing a violent confrontation between police and protesters at People’s Park in Berkeley, California. Benson made connections between the war and the disruption experienced by the people asked to go fight it—often young, working class, and people of color. He shopped the song around a bit before furnishing it to Gaye, who polished it into the recorded form we know now.

Much of the album was developed with a similarly collaborative process, with Gaye serving as the refiner of song drafts provided by others. “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)” is the only song on the album penned by Gaye alone.

As David Ritz explains in the liner notes to the 25^th anniversary re-release of What’s Going On, Gaye’s brother, Frankie, is the implicit protagonist of the album. Frankie Gaye served three tours in Vietnam. “What’s Happening Brother” tells this part of the story most directly, but the conversation reappears in other parts of the album. The country to which our protagonist veteran returns falls short of the ideals he had supposedly gone abroad to defend. Gaye’s veteran dramatizes the 1970s iteration of veterans like those Bronzeville doughboys, Medgar Evers, and others who were asked to be fully soldiers, but were not permitted to be fully citizens, either by law, custom, or socio-economic inertia.

The Heinz History Museum in Pittsburgh used “What’s Happening Brother” for the soundtrack to a photomontage for its 2007 exhibit “Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era.“

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