What’s Going On: The Sound of a Man, a Moment, and a Movement

Some albums are flawless—technically perfect—masterpieces of production, arrangement, and execution. And yet, something is missing—some intangible element that separates great from transcendent.

I don’t know what that something is.

But What’s Going On has it.

It’s there in the first few seconds before Marvin Gaye even starts to sing. A murmur of voices, street-corner conversation fading in and out, a saxophone moaning in the distance. It doesn’t feel like the start of an album—it feels like stepping into something already in motion. Something real. Something urgent.

Because Marvin wasn’t just making music anymore.

His marriage was unraveling. The woman he built duets with, Tammi Terrell, was gone—taken by a brain tumor at 24, her voice silenced before it had the chance to live its full measure. His brother had come home from Vietnam, but Marvin had already been there in spirit—receiving letter after letter, each painting a picture more brutal than the last. He saw America burning in protest, drowning in war, divided by race, suffocated by injustice, and the weight of it all pressed down on him.

And so, he did what only the great ones do. He put it all into the music.

This album is not just a collection of songs. It is a prayer, a lament, and a call to action. It refines the messages of the ’60s—love, peace, resistance, revolution—into something pure and undeniable.

A Different Kind of Protest

Other protest music of the time was raw, defiant, and urgent. It called for fists in the air and battle lines to be drawn. But Marvin took another path.

What’s Going On does not shout—it weeps. It does not rage—it pleads. It does not accuse—it begs America to look itself in the mirror and reckon with what it sees.

“Mother, mother / There’s too many of you crying.”

“Brother, brother, brother / There’s far too many of you dying.”

These are not slogans. These are not rallying cries. These are wounds, laid bare over melodies so lush, so deeply felt, that you almost forget you are being confronted.

A Vision That Was Almost Lost

And what makes this album even more remarkable is that it rarely existed.

Motown didn’t want this. Berry Gordy thought it was too political, too risky, too different. But Marvin fought for it. He refused to back down and kept singing about love and romance while the world fell apart. He believed in this music so much that he was willing to walk away from everything if it meant it would never be heard.

And thank God he fought.

Because this album still matters.

The war may have changed, but the battlefield remains. The poverty, the racism, the injustice, the disregard for human life—it’s all still here. And Marvin’s voice, decades later, still asks the same question:

What’s going on?

This is what separates technically perfect albums from the ones that live forever.

What’s Going On is not just music.

It is soul.

It is history.

It is Marvin Gaye—raw, vulnerable, broken, and unfiltered—pouring himself into something bigger than sound, bigger than sales, bigger than time itself.

It is, simply put, greatness.

By Kyle Hayes

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