What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye

Hitsville, 1971: Gaye vs Motown on a protest album

In the spring of 1971, Marvin Gaye stopped asking Motown for another love song and asked a harder question out loud. What’s Going On, released that May on Tamla, opens with party chatter and Eli Fontaine’s accidental alto, then settles into a soft rhythm that carries Vietnam, police violence, and the polluted air in the same soft voice. Berry Gordy hated the single at first. The public did not.

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 pop. 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.