What's Going On (1971)

Somehow I seem to forget how good this is—little surprise, I suppose, given its age. It turns 40 this year. I knew it in its time first for all those hits it spawned, three top 10s, one after the other, living and breathing all through the entire year. It seemed so strange coming from the radio, sweet and almost cloying, almost too much so, and so different from anything that any other soul act was up to. It used to put me back in the fast-food kitchen I worked in in the early '70s, with a radio tuned to top 40 stations. Later on, more like in the '80s, this album started shooting up pretty high on all-time greatest lists, and then I picked up a copy for myself and got a taste of the whole thing. It works as all-day music all in itself. Play a side, flip it, the other side, and again. Again. Again. Good way to go. I guess that wasn't long before his death, around the time of the Columbia album, Midnight Love, last official studio release. I was impressed, am impressed still, by the flowingness of it, working as a suite, cohering by the unified sound, and this is also where he started doing his thing of working themes, putting them out there and returning to them again, in short snips and longer workouts, sometimes dropping out the vocal. An album artist. It was really a far cry from the song-centric Motown catalog to that point (not that I'm about to knock any of that), working more like a weird kind of jazz album, certainly intended to be played and used and experienced as a totality. One side, flip it, the other side. Keep going. It's so suffused with that sad tenderness and the sawing, soaring strings. Gaye is half the time singing with something that's almost a speaking voice, at least on one part of the dense mixes, while in other parts he swoops and winds around that main, low-key, speaking vocal, taking off with the song almost on whims, as if the mood had just struck him and everything just follows. He's like a gifted basketball player in that way too, explosive, darting and weaving and head-faking and all that, moving around the key, handling the ball, and then leaping high. Those are the bursts of new melody, in combination with key changes that are doing something mysterious too, working a stairway higher. It leaves me sad for other times and lost pasts, but it's a way back there too, and I'm pretty sure always will be.