Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On': Why It's Still the Best Thing We've Ever Heard

I’ve gotta tell ya, I’m really tired of writing about the regime, its leaders, their politics, and its impact. I’m tired of having nothing but bad and worse news to talk about. I’m sick of feeling like there’s no future where we don’t live with lascivious fascists in control of our lives.

So I’m not going to write about any of that today. Instead, I’m going to mark an important cultural anniversary. 54 years ago today, Marvin Gaye, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant musical artists of all time, released his opus perfectum, “What’s Going On.”

When going through the music of “What’s Going On,” you hear a Black man beginning the title track, moving through the world in amazement at how far things have fallen. It’s an honest analysis from someone who lived a very troubled life and found himself in the middle of a world in pain.

Despite how personal the album was for Gaye, there is no question that these songs could be played today as a soundtrack of a nation falling apart and dragging the world down with it. The songs express a frustration with society, but also the helplessness we all feel watching it burn, because awful as it is, it’s the only society we know.

We've Got to Find a Way

The 1970s marked the beginning of the Black Identity Movement (also known as Black Power or Black Liberation). The Civil Rights movement, which preceded it, in my opinion, was more rigidly defined. Marches. Martin, Medgar, and Malcolm. Activism in every corner. But Black Identity was more of an arrival of a younger generation that had grown up seeing these things and wanted to assume their place in America on their own terms.

This meant their own unique expression, from music and dance to art and even the language we used. It was so prevalent that it seemed dominant, at least for a while. Tupac Shakur summed it up when he rapped, “I remember Marvin Gaye used to sing to me, he had me feeling like Black was the thing to be…”

Gaye did not start the Black Identity Movement as we saw it in the 70s, but “What’s Going On” gave performers of all kinds license to express derision with social conditions openly. No longer was there a requirement that we “go along to get along.” There was room to publicly say, “this ain’t right.” That is how the Civil Rights leaders handed the baton to their successors.

Now, why is this important? Largely because Gaye could have released it in 2025 and it would still have the same effect. Personally, I think we need much, much more art that has this kind of impact. That scares a government hell bent on silencing voices that speak out against it and empowers people to fight back against megalomaniacs.

Hey Baby, What You Know Good?

Around the time the album’s concept emerged, Gaye was going through it. He was married to Motown Records founder Berry Gordy’s sister, Anna (who co-founded the company), but the convoluted marriage was doomed for a lot of reasons. He was also in a tailspin of depression over the death of his close friend and fellow Motown artist, the beautiful Tammi Terrell – whose duets marked the maturing of the label’s formula of well-produced but bubbly, unoffensive dance and party records into Grown Folks Music. Gaye went into years of seclusion after this.

At the same time, America had endured a decade of turmoil. One president assassinated. His brother suffering the same fate; three Civil Rights icons slain in the space of five years, southern politicians fighting tooth and nail to deny citizens the right to vote because they were Black; a war America had no business being in had killed thousands of her sons in a place most of us had never even heard of, and her cities going up in flames with rage at the social injustices that had plagued people for generations.

It was in this setting that Gaye, inspired by a conversation he had with his brother Frankie, who had just returned from serving in Vietnam, changed his artistic direction.

But Gaye was among a growing number of Black people in America who decided to loudly call bullshit on the American narrative of just following the law and and assuming everything would be perfect, because that was a lie. Motown Records itself sat less than a mile from the epicenter of the 1967 riot, which still impacts Detroit to this day. It was time for America to be shown the truth about itself. The only way for Gaye to express this was through his music.

“I wanted to write an album that could be translated into any language and it would still hold its meaning and not be particularly an ethnic statement that other nations or people couldn’t get into,” Gaye told broadcast host Paul Gambaccini in a 1976 interview for BBC Radio 1. “I took a little time to think about that pholosophically because I was much more incensed and I wanted to write stinging things and do music that would really make people say ‘wow, he’s after us’ and maybe incense them also.”

A Time When The World Won't Be Singing

We know how Gaye’s life ended in 1984: shot dead by the father he tried so hard to please, one day before his 45th birthday. By this time, he was twice divorced, dealing with addiction, and the critical and commercial success of the also classic “Midnight Love” LP did not result in financial success, so he was in heavy debt.

America had moved on as well. While the Soul music he was still very much responsible for inspiring continued to course through our cultural veins, America had entered a more superficial, material phase. We became more interested in opulence and personal gain than in pushing back against exploitation by the wealthy and powerful. The government, media, and various industries would outright lie to us about the world around us, and we’d lap it up off the floor and send our kids to the mall.

We stopped asking, “What’s going on?” and in my view, we never asked the question again; it’s sad to say. But if we can learn any lesson from Gaye, it’s that there is no power that can shut us up if we refuse.

Things are damned awful right now. Nobody could have predicted the morose spirit that is casting a pall over land that once felt free, but is now policed by a cult, governed by autocrats, and fleeced by a college of Caligulas.

No, it will take more than releasing amazingly made music to change society, but art always inspires us to dream of better. It is the energy of our spirits and we will always need a Marvin Gaye asking, and telling us: “What’s Going On.”

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.