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What's Going On - Marvin Gaye - 1971
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that though I knew of this album, I had not listened to it until a few years back, when I featured it in my Classic Albums I Have Never Heard journal (cos, you know, I hadn't) and it'll be no surprise to anyone I was totally knocked out by it.
It would of course be overly simplifying things to suggest that "black music" (for want of a better term, so forgive me) up until the release of this album had been basically in one of four categories: jazz, blues, soul/funk (which would kind of metamorphose during this decade into disco) and gospel. I'm sure there were other genres, but when we think of black music around this period, that's what comes to mind.
Blues dealt with the bad side of life, but generally (and again this is open to correction/education) was a more personal thing - my life has gone to crud, I can't get a job, my woman done left me etc - while jazz was, well, jazz, and being mostly (again, sorry if I'm oversimplifying or stereotyping; I don't mean to) instrumental, didn't have a lot to say about politics or the state of the world. Gospel was all, naturally, praise God and He is mighty, and while it certainly arose from and reflected the time of slavery, again it did not tackle any real-world issues. And funk and soul? Hey, they were all about havin' a good time, brother!
So for an artist like Gaye to come out with a record like this in his chosen genre was, well, pretty mindblowing and earth-shattering. Certainly, it wasn't the first collection of songs to protest against the Vietnam War (Dylan, for one, had been doing this since the late sixties, and would continue to do so) but mostly, that kind of thing seemed left to the folk and indeed “hippy” generation.
Black folks didn't seem to have an opinion on the war, or if they did, they were keeping their mouths shut about it. Gaye set out to challenge this very mindset, asking everyone – but especially his black brothers and sisters - to “look around and see what's going on”. And they did.
The album didn't quite start a revolution, but it could be argued that political consciousness in black music had its wellspring here.
Later artists like Gil Scott-Heron would take that baton and run with it, as would others, and of course Gaye himself would be taken from us a short thirteen years later, though he would have firmly made his mark on music by then, though not so much as a political commentator, with songs like “Heard it Through the Grapevine” and “Sexual Healing” becoming his legacy. But it all started here, brothers and sisters. This was the clarion call, one man looking around and asking himself how could not only the world be as it was, but nobody care?
