<<<Back to page 2

Holler love across the nation

Just as violence abroad and violence at home are not separable for Gaye, neither are these expressions of violence separable from a fundamental spiritual crisis. Although the more secular sounding songs get most of the airplay for What’s Going On, Gaye offers a religious resolution to the social failings he describes in them. He echoes musically what Martin Luther King, Jr. had voiced homiletically not too long before.

“For only love can conquer hate.”

It starts with love and understanding, but in “God is Love,” “Right On,” and “Wholy Holy,” Gaye goes further, pointing to faith as solutions for the violence we do to ourselves, the world, and each other. Violence to ourselves appears in “Flying High (In the Friendly Sky).” Violence to the world appears in “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology).” I don’t mean these more metaphorical uses of “violence” to dilute the term. They point back to the core problem and to Gaye’s source of hope in responding to it.

Gaye signs off his liner notes to the album thusly:

“Find God: we’ve got to find the Lord. Allow him to influence us. I mean what other weapons have we to fight the forces of hatred and evil. And check out the Ten Commandments too. You can’t go too far wrong if you live them, dig it. Just a sincere and personal contact with God will keep you more together. Love the Lord, be thankful, feel peace. Thanks for life and loved ones. Thank you Jesus. Love, Marvin Gaye.”

New vision

Gaye pushed hard for freedom from the Motown hit formula in making What’s Going On. Incorporating jazz arrangements and developing a full length concept album like this were definitely not part of Barry Gordy’s hit strategy. The album is an integrated whole, with hit singles to be sure, but the songs cohere and inform one another, musically and thematically. Gaye was not the first to introduce social commentary into soul music or Motown. Besides Sam Cooke, other artists, including The Temptations, brought an angrier, post-MLK feeling to “Ball of Confusion,” for example. Protest was still the exception to the rule. Obie Benson, for instance, couldn’t convince the other three Four Tops to record “What’s Going On.”

Gaye transformed the outrage of the era into art. As David Ritz writes:

“From the opening riffs of the kicked-back alto sax, sounds flow like a sensual stream of consciousness. Marvin [is] mellow yet melancholy, relaxed yet remorseful. The contradictions are part of the pull, essential to the charm. For all his sincere complexity, Marvin’s message is startlingly clear: love before it’s too late.”  

Gaye was more crooner than firebrand, but the message still burned brightly.

NPR’s Sound Opinions recently broadcast a “classic album dissection” of What’s Going On. I highly recommend it for understanding the story of the album’s creation and its musical legacy. (You can find other accounts here, here, and here.) I’m most interested in pursuing in this post why I resonate with it and why it still speaks today.

At the outset, I have to acknowledge that it’s the music that wins me over before the message. What’s Going On appears on many Best of All Time lists, and with good reason. All the contradictions and charm that Ritz describes above open the heart before they open the mind. Protest music often runs the risk of letting its moral weight squash its artistry. Gaye’s primary achievement is not letting that happen at all. He brings peace before he preaches it.

How he brings the message is crucial to his effectiveness. What he has to say, though, is crucial to the album’s relevance, both then and now.

Marvin Gaye (photo credit unknown)

Brother, Brother

In the five years I have been writing this blog, Chicago’s violence has been a topic of national conversation. My motivation for starting the blog was completely unrelated, and my writing doesn’t address these events or issues directly. I’ve been wondering though if there is any tie; and if there isn’t, whether there should be. In general, the answer is no, as we are a music blog, not a blog about violence or crime. On the other hand, we believe that the arts and humanities help us put events into context.

As always, I want to focus here on how the music functions, and not on violence per se, still less on the political issues that surround it. What’s Going On works for me in part, though, because it helps me come to terms, artistically at least, with the social conditions that contribute to violence. It points to how we might better understand, cope with, and address it. In terms we’ve heard before, it reconciles us with the world without accepting the world as it is.

I’ve wrestled with this question of why this album is meaningful to me a long time in composing this post. I’ve tried to figure out why it moves me the way that it does. Does it soothe my conscience? Does it make me feel better about myself, taking comfort in the idea that I’m socially aware? No, that’s not it. Part of the difficulty in answering this question is that my reason for discussing it here differs from the reason I connect with it. I loved the album long before I thought about Murder Ballad Monday.

As many Americans tend to focus on violence as an urban issue, many Chicagoans view it as an issue only for certain neighborhoods. There’s some logic to this, and I tend to do it myself. Less than one tenth of the police districts in Chicago account for over a quarter of the homicides. Listening to the album, though, undercuts the idea that there is any “them.” No, there is only an “us.” What’s Going On puts the lie to that instinct to separate and make distant. It provides a reminder that ending the habit of distancing is one step toward decreasing
everybody’s suffering.

Continue to page 4>>>