Marvin Gaye. What's Going On. EX++ R & B Soul Funk Motown LP

$

59

Marvin Gaye. What's Going On. Motown Records(TS310). 1971.

What’s Going On is, in certain ways, a culmination of everything Marvin Gaye had learned and done with Motown up to that time. Its lush production, with strings and saxophone expertly incorporated in indelible melodies, bears a strong imprint of that studio’s sound, already famous by then for churning out hit after hit. Gaye puts his incredible vocal range to work in each song, switching from sultry and smooth to pure anguish as needed. It’s obviously an album that builds on what came before.

But it’s not just in the lyrics that What’s Going On distinguishes itself from other Motown material, great as that material was and remains. You get it first in the titular opening track, whose opening “notes” aren’t notes at all but rather a busy array of speaking voices, making the listener feel like he’s just walked into a party. And once the music begins, with its soaring strings carrying along Gaye’s smooth-or-straining singing, you hear another strange touch: The vocal is double-tracked, but one track lags behind the other. You hear Gaye’s voice twice, either for emphasis — or to introduce a sense of discord, a tension, into a song that remains highly pleasurable listening thanks to Gaye’s pure musical talent.

“What’s Going On” not only literally invites the listener into the album, but introduces its concept: an examination of contemporary life, particularly of African Americans. All was hardly well for black America in 1971 — a respect in which this album remains unfortunately relevant — and Gaye does not shy away from that. We see the struggles of the nation through a soldier just returned from war (“What’s Happening Brother”), through a drug addict (“Flyin’ High in the Friendly Sky”), and through other characters and perspectives. Though they are “Inner City Blues,” as identified by a later track, and it’s important not to deny them as such, as with all great art, the particular speaks to the universal. The economically distressed of all eras, including our own, find something sadly recognizable in the returned soldier’s plea for work: “Can’t find no work, can’t find no job, my friend/Money is tighter than it’s ever been.”

Cover Rated 7+ or EX- low gloss gatefold cover, minor corner bumps, light edge wear/Record 8 or EX+ black and shiny withh merest of sleeve rubs.

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American Charles Lloyd is an Afro-American jazz saxophonist, living in Santa Barbara, California. He also plays