Divided Soul

What’s Going On: Marvin Gaye’s Singular Vision for a Classic Album

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This week in 1971, Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On was released by Tamla Records, a subsidiary of Motown. The unified concept album,  consisting of nine linked songs, was inspired by the experiences of Gaye's brother Frankie, who had witnessed sickening death and destruction during what he deemed to be an unjust and useless war in Vietnam, according to music writer David Ritz, author of Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye.
The 2003 biography is compiled largely from interviews for Gaye's planned autobiography, which Ritz intended to co-write until Gaye was killed in 1984 by his own father.
"Looking at a crazed America at the start of the seventies, he asked, 'What's going on?', convinced that he had the answer," Ritz writes. The planned autobiography wouldn't have been the first collaboration between the two; Ritz is credited as a co-writer of Gaye's hit song "Sexual Healing." The biography's cast of characters includes Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, and Stevie Wonder, and is buoyed by confessional insights from Gaye himself.
"I wanted to treat the album as an album, not as a string of small songs," Gaye told Ritz about the conception of What's Going On. "So I found a theme, and I tried to explore it from different angles. At first, I was afraid, because I didn't know whether this had ever been done before, but when I got started I actually found the process came naturally. It was easy. Don Juan was right: I was traveling down a path of the heart."
The introspective album, covering subject matter considered totally radical by 1971 standards, was an instant commercial and critical success. Although his first self-produced, self-written opus was career and life-altering,  Gaye's struggles with marijuana and cocaine addiction, the IRS, his marriages, and his relationship with his record label continued.
Upon hearing What's Going On for the first time, Motown didn't like the album. Ritz quotes Gaye's recollection of the experience: "They didn't like it, didn't understand it, and didn't trust it. Management said the songs were too long, too formless, and would get lost on a public looking for easy three-minute stories. For months they wouldn't release it. My attitude had to be firm. Basically I said, 'Put it out or I'll never record for you again.' That was my ace in the hole, and I had to play it."
Music history proves that Gaye was wise to trust his instincts in writing from his immediate experience. What's Going On, which topped Rolling Stone's year-end list as album of the year, was set in America's black urban neighborhoods. The title song begins with festive sounds fresh from the streets of his childhood, and during the recording of the album over ten days, Marvin's friends created an intimate atmosphere in which he could be most comfortable. Through loyalty to his own life story and his immediate circle's support for that vision, Gaye created a classic album that led to his recognition as a nuanced and serious artist beyond the confines of R&B, across the borders of country and race.