Since his tragic and premature death in 1984, Marvin Gaye’s discography has steadily risen in critical esteem, and particularly What’s Going On, his eleventh album and the enduring apex of the man’s posthumous ascension, as it’s landed atop at least one noted list of the Greatest Albums of All Time. And so, Motown/uMe has understandably endeavored with due diligence in marking the half century since that LP was originally released, their work culminating in a 50th Anniversary Edition on double vinyl, which adds six original mono single versions, plus four rare mixes of the title track, to the nine masterful selections that comprise the original album.
As fruitful as the 1960s were for Marvin Gaye, he didn’t really hit his stride until the first half of the following decade, with What’s Going On the record that began his run as a fully-formed, mature artist. It took until the second half of the ’60s for Gaye to really find his footing inside the Motown hit machine, and there was indeed a bunch of excellent singles and even a few classic LPs during that stretch, but with his second record of the ’70s, he began transcending the boundaries of the Motown framework.
Records like What’s Going On can be intimidating to engage with in print, mainly because they can inspire mere rephrasing of long-established observations, or to the other extreme, straining for a fresh perspective (which frequently ends up having little to do with the actual music). It’s been said that any truly great record is inexhaustible, and by that metric, there should always be something new to say about their individual qualities, but it’s just as true that many masterpieces are relatively straightforward in their brilliance.
It’s true that What’s Going On is something of a rarity in how it stylistically advances its genre while remaining pretty firmly inside the realms of pop. There’s nothing edgy about the music (a la Funkadelic), or uncompromising (like James Brown’s work of the period). Instead, Gaye favored sophisticated string arrangements that came to define soul at its most urbane in the first half of the ’70s (Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Gamble & Huff), and as the decade progressed, served as a primary building block in the emergence of pop-disco.
Gaye’s blossoming social consciousness obviously wasn’t a new development in the pop sphere, and furthermore, wasn’t even unheard of within the relatively conservative parameters of Motown (it wasn’t even novel to Gaye’s output, in fact). But the thoughtfulness of the overall work surely must’ve been a breath of fresh air at the time (and a counterbalance to the pessimism of Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On).
Not that What’s Going On is an overly optimistic album. But listening to it over the years has continued to give me hope, even in a stretch of time as fucked up as the last few years have been. And much of the beauty derives from the string arrangements that some once derided as saccharine, as if soul music’s only proper qualities are grit and sweat.
And a reliable yardstick for an LP’s greatness is when its singles don’t hinder the overall flow. It’s difficult to think of a record more unhindered than What’s Going On, an album where the singles (the opening title track, “Mercy Mercy Me” and “Inner City Blues (Make Me Want to Holler)”) are absolutely crucial. I remain particularly smitten with the jump cut from “God Is Love” into “Mercy Mercy Me,” and this expanded set is one of the few occasions where multiple versions of the same song, in this case the title track, add significant value rather than just padding out the contents.
The extras are well assembled on this edition, and non-LP B-side “Sad Tomorrows” is a nice inclusion, but it’s the sheer vitality of sides one and two, the original LP natch, that makes this edition of What’s Going On so worthwhile. Vinyl lovers who don’t already own a copy should find this set to be an enlightening, wholly digestible and inexhaustible delight.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
