3.
Various Artists – Motown Chartbusters Vol. 3
At the time, it was primarily a singles market. There was supposed to have been the invention of the album as the new means to consume music, with the arrival of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but I don’t really think that’s true because prior to that, back in the 40s and 50s, you had jazz albums. The only way to buy Motown, though, was in these compilation forms – and this was the first of them that I bought. This is absolutely perfect – Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder.
It was just after this that the stable started to collapse – Marvin Gaye went on to do What’s Going On, Stevie Wonder doing all his synthesizer stuff. But at this point, Motown had been at the top for the best part of the decade. And what they’d done was to put black music right at the heart of popular music. And what with the British and everyone else accepting it, that forced America not to marginalise its own black music. Because up until then, the Americans had separate charts for black music. They still do, I think. Very much a case of "that’s your chart, this is our chart".
