Marvin Gaye'sComplicated Sex Attitude

Marvin Gaye - Let’s Get It On  (Motown, 1973)

Marvin’s done peace; now he does lurve – but not without a tilt at the wife.
Sex is the hardest thing to write pop songs about. It’s easy to look like a drooling loser (hello, Har Mar Superstar) or masturbatory nerd (hello, most heavy metal lyricists). Luckily, when Marvin Gaye undertook a whole album about rumpy-pumpy, he had a quarter-century of R&B tradition in his corner and a Motown band so mellifluously aflame they’d have made the crassest come-on sound persuasive. The promise of Gaye’s sophisticated loving is all in his voice, coarser than the crystalline angeltone he employed on What’s Going On, but no less exquisite, and similarly augmented by a crosstalk of Marvindubs and brilliantly inventive backing vox (the impressionistic, dove-like coos from 3:50 in Let’s Get It On are astonishing). Best is You Sure Love To Ball, bathed in warm fuzziness, guitars getting it on with harps with such empathy that they become almost indistinguishable, and Madeline and Fred Ross’s gasping and moaning errs just the right side of Lil’ Louis’s French Kiss.

But Gaye’s own attitude to sex was complicated – his preacher father’s fire and brimstone prudery had planted a seedling of guilt that never withered – and Let’s Get It On would not be the great art it is if it were a mere carnival of zipless erotomania. Gaye ends with Just To Keep You Satisfied, in which the sweet loving is weighed against “the bitching” and Marvin ends up concluding that maybe he’ll see her “somewhere down the line”. It must be the weirdest ever song to carry co-writing credits by a husband and wife, but Anna Gaye (sister of Motown boss Berry Gordy) had already ceded her position in the Marv bedroom to Janis Hunter, jazz legend Slim Gaillard’s 17-year-old daughter. Marvin’s rewrite of his wife’s Motown staple must have rubbed salt in the wound, and by the time the similarly sex-mad I Want You appeared in 1976, he’d had two children by Janis and the childless Anna had filed for divorce. Love hurts as much as it heals; Let’s Get It On knows that as well as anyone.