1. When Marvin Gaye first signed to Motown Records, he had a contract as a session drummer before releasing his first R&B singles in 1961. He had a four octave vocal range. A lot of his music was about love, drugs, and political views.
2. Marvin Gaye’s lyrics on What’s Going On are influenced heavily by love, drug usage (in Flyin High for example), poverty, the Vietnam war, and concerns for the future of the youth.
3. Berry Gordy from Motown said that What’s Going On was the worst record he had ever heard in his life, in attempts to keep Marvin Gaye from releasing it. Gordy feared that the song in which the main topic was anti-war, would ruin Gaye’s image to the public as Motown’s sex symbol. Eventually the song was released on January 17th, 1971 with very little promotion, after having semi-violent disagreements between Berry & Marvin for recording the track. After selling more than 2 million singles, an album was requested.
4. Before the release of What’s Going On, there was really no song talking about drug abuse, pollution, poverty, and taxes coming from Motown Records. The mixture of funk, jazz, classical, and Latin soul arrangements departed the album from the usual “Motown Sound”. This album was self-produced, since he had no help from the Motown staff. He made it into a concept album in how each song had a theme and from track to track there was a segue flow into each other.
5. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On leaves me with a sense of inspiration seeing as how he talked about everyday-problems, issues with society, and even simple things such as love. The album is definitely one of my personal favorites, and you can hear pieces that have been used as samples in hip-hop which is how I first found out about who Marvin Gaye was.
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