A question Motown tried to bury
In the spring of 1971, Marvin Gaye stopped asking Motown for another love song and asked a harder question, one the label did not want on the radio. What’s Going On does not begin with a downbeat so much as with a room. Voices overlap, a party already underway, a saxophone warming up as if nobody has called the take. Then the vocal arrives, close and almost conversational, a man speaking to the people in the room rather than performing at them. Released on 21 May 1971, the album sounds like Detroit after the dream of the sixties has thinned, still elegant, no longer innocent.
The title song had been waiting since 1970. Renaldo “Obie” Benson of the Four Tops brought the idea after watching police break up a demonstration in Berkeley; Al Cleveland helped shape it; Gaye rewrote it around his brother Frankie, home from Vietnam and unable to find the country he had left. Berry Gordy heard the finished single and refused it. Too long, too strange, too political for the machine that had sold young America a smoother weather. Gaye answered that he would not record again until it came out. While Gordy was away, the single was released anyway. It rose. The scolding phone call came after the fact. By then the question was already in the street.
The album that followed is a suite, not a stack of singles. Songs crossfade as if one breath. What’s Happening Brother is the soldier’s letter. Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky) and Save the Children turn inward, then outward again. God Is Love keeps a gospel door open. Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) looks at the sky and the water as if they were also next of kin. Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) closes on bills, taxes, and a trigger that will not stay in the news. David Van De Pitte arranged the strings so they hover rather than sweeten. The Funk Brothers play with the looseness of men who have been told, for once, to leave the mistakes that feel true. Eli Fontaine’s alto, caught in a warm-up, stayed in the intro because Gaye heard it and said to leave it there.
How could you release that? It’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life!
(Berry Gordy to Barney Ales, recounted in Nelson George, Where Did Our Love Go, 1985)
Motown had built an empire on answers: the right key, the right length, the right smile. What’s Going On offered a question and then refused to solve it in three minutes. It reached the top of the R&B album chart and the pop top ten, which did not make Gordy wrong about the risk, only late about the public. Gaye produced it himself, multi-tracking his voice until it sounded like a congregation of one man. Later he would say he had tried to follow the record and kept finding he had already said it. He chose, more than once, to let it stand.
Play it from the top without skipping. The party noise at the opening is not decoration. It is the proof that the sermon happens in a room where people are still talking, still pouring drinks, still alive. The groove never shouts. That is the discipline. Anger, here, is arranged. Ecology, war, and the rent arrive in the same velvet voice, and the velvet does not cancel them. Fifty years on, the question in the title has not been retired. The record simply keeps asking it with better manners than the news.
