Track Listing

1. What's Going On
2. What's Happening Brother
3. Flyin' High (In The Friendly Sky)
4. Save the Children
5. God Is Love
6. Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)
7. Right On
8. Wholy Holy
9. Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
10. God Is Love (Bonus Track)
11. Sad Tomorrows a/k/a "Flyin' High (In The Friendly Sky)" (Bonus Track)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1196 in Music
• Released on: 2003-01-14
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Extra tracks, Original recording remastered

Amazon.com essential recording
Sly & The Family Stone might have psychedelicized soul music, but Marvin Gaye personalized it. Although the powers-that-were Motown didn't even want to release the record, the unexpected success of What's Going On, issued in 1971, inspired Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, and just about every other black artist on the planet to take greater responsibility for their music and its meaning. Gaye co-wrote the songs and produced the album, flavoring it with layer upon layer of his own multi-tracked vocals, oceans of hand percussion, strings, flutes, and jazzy horn solos. Spacey and loose as a spliff-fueled Sunday afternoon jam in the park, the nine songs all played like a hit single. The title track--inspired by his brother's return from the Vietnam War--and the obvious social commentary of "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" and "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" actually were hit singles. Two other tracks ("Wholly Holy" and "Save the Children") would inspire hit covers by Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross, respectively. Nevertheless, What's Going On sounds as fresh today as it did the week that it came out. Recommended reading: Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz (McGraw-Hill, 1985). --Don Waller

Customer Reviews

"Close your eyes/ so you can see..."
I have a funny relationship with What's Going On; listening to it, I can totally understand the rave reviews, the adoring fans, the consistently high rankings in "best albums of all time" type surveys. I totally dig that this album kinda sorta revolutionized soul music, established Marvin Gaye as a "serious" artist (although it is criminally wrong to imply that "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" isn't high art), and set the tone for a more hard-edged breed of socially minded pop. I even recognize the music as being genuinely gorgeous, and I understand the phenomenal emotional impact that these songs must have on people.

The thing is, I really don't care if I ever hear this record again.

I really can't understand why. Sure, What's Going On has its faults - the lyrics can be a bit too obvious and melodramatic at times, and some of the themes seem somewhat dated- but none of them seem like a compelling reason to give the overall work less than five stars. Criticizing the album for any of its obvious faults would feel like I was just looking for a reason to explain why I gave it a less-than-perfect score.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that What's Going On is a bit too perfect. It seems glossy at times, glossy and calculated and hermetically sealed. Listening to it, I feel like I'm watching a stage play that would be performed in the exact same manner no matter who the audience consists of. It's a one-trick album that happens to be very good at its trick, a well-preserved piece of art that's been encased in wax and left to hang silently in a museum, a cold monument to the ideal of emotional expression held by its creator.

Or something like that.

Gaye's Moon Shot - Without Peer!
A pivotal chapter in the oral history of Motown Records has it that when Berry Gordy, the label's founder, first heard Marvin Gaye's conceptual masterwork he simply wanted to shelve it as the ramblings of a self-indulgent "artiste" who had lost his commercial bearings - since nothing about the record conformed to Gordy's hugely successful "Motown Sound" formula that routinely cranked out hits in apolitical, three minute increments.

As the story continues, Smokey Robinson supposedly intervened informing Gordy that " while he did not quite know how to classify Gaye's new offering but he was certain that it was divinely inspired" (or words to that effect.) At this point the Motown chieftain relented and agreed to a "limited" pressing. Thank you Smokey!

Even after hundreds of plays, What's Going On still leaves me speechless and groping for new superlatives. This is a mesmerizing and timeless record that is literally the soul and spirit of an extremely troubled man turned inside out with his humanity and heartache pressed into every groove.

Coming off a multi-year hiatus from recording in 1971 with his own life in shambles and the social and racial fabric of the nation unraveling, Gaye was able to channel his own fragility into a staggering and moving testimony to life on the streets that so poignently tapestried the crosscurrents of joy, beauty, redemption, drugs, despair, racism, anger and hopelessness - all within the framework of a near perfect thirty nine minute song cycle.

Of course you'll recognize the three major hits - What's Going On, Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) and Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) however it the quieter, more plaintive pieces such as Save the Children and Wholy Holy that allow Marvin to open his veins and infuse the entire record with supernatural grace.

What's Going On is Gaye's urban gospel of alienation told against a musical score that remains to this day a reference standard for rock-funk-R&B fusion and forms the foundation for what is IMHO the single greatest achievement in popular recording since Chuck Berry laid down his first three chords. WGO should be a cornerstone title for any collection not only for what the record once meant but for the meaning that it continues to offer new audiences.

OH MARVIN................
AT 52 YEARS OLD THIS REMAINS MY FAVORITE ALBUM OF ALL TIMES AS MARVIN IS MY FAVORITE SINGER!HIS MESSAGE STILL RINGS TRUE AND REVALENT,TO THESE HORRIFIC TIMES W ARE LIVING IN.................THERE WILL NEVER ANOTHER ARTIST QUITE AS SENSITIVE AND INTUATIVE TO SOCIAL INJUSTICES AS MARVIN.................A TRUE RENAISSANCE MAN!