What's Going On — 1971

Background

What's Going On was, by Marvin Gaye's own account, the album where he stopped making records the way Motown wanted and started making the record he needed to make. The label, under Berry Gordy, initially refused to release the title track, viewing it as too political and too far from the commercial Motown sound that had built Gaye's career. Gaye held firm, and when the single was eventually released against label resistance, it became one of the fastest-selling singles in Motown's history — forcing Gordy to allow a full album built in the same spirit.

A concept album

The album is a genuine song cycle rather than a loose collection — segued together almost without pause, following the perspective of a Vietnam veteran returning home to a country fractured by war, poverty, racial injustice and environmental collapse. 'What's Going On' opens the record with a famous ambient party-chatter intro before settling into its central plea for understanding rather than conflict; 'What's Happening Brother' follows directly, viewing the same disillusionment through the veteran's own eyes; 'Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)' closes the album on a track built around a stark, almost fatalistic groove and one of Gaye's most direct lyrics about poverty and police violence.

Sound

Musically the album owes as much to jazz as to soul — the Funk Brothers, Motown's in-house session players, were given far more room to improvise than the label's tightly arranged hit singles usually allowed, and Gaye layered his own multi-tracked vocals into dense, conversational harmonies rather than a single lead line. 'Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)' addresses environmental destruction with a gentleness that makes the subject land harder than a more strident approach would have, while 'Right On' stretches past seven minutes on a groove that owes an open debt to the jazz fusion of the period.

Legacy

What's Going On is regularly cited as the moment soul music proved it could carry the same social and political weight as folk and rock protest music, doing so without sacrificing an ounce of its musicality or commercial appeal. It gave Gaye creative control he'd never previously had at Motown and reshaped what the label — and soul music more broadly — would allow an artist to say on record. Rolling Stone and numerous other critical bodies have named it among the greatest albums ever made, and its influence runs directly through the more socially engaged strain of soul and R&B that followed across the 1970s.