6. Marvin GayeWhat
The thing about Marvin is that it’s a personal journey. He spent so much time entertaining people and making them happy and smiling a lot and looking sharp and being really, like, Mr. Manners for the whole label. ‘Sexual Healing’ and all that stuff came a lot later.
He went through a lot of personal pain. That whole Vietnam thing… people don’t realise in England how many black people fought there. The race riots and all that stuff kicked off and the drugs that were coming back in… it looked like so much of the progress… what with Dr. King’s death, it was so crazy what was going on and Motown wasn’t about that. Motown was classy black people doing their thing, you know, and it wasn’t about the revolution. It was the opposite to the word on the street.
So, for him to even do this record, against Berry Gordy’s wishes, was like, this is not the role you play; this is not your archetype in this parade. It was amazing and the way he articulated all that stuff musically and lyrically is so smooth but it’s filled with so much pain. I could feel that so it speaks to me as a listener and it never gets old for me. A lot of these songs, when I go backwards, all of this stuff is songs that I wish I could write but it’s all pretty much once in a lifetime stuff.
It’s so amazing that this came out of him; it’s so honest. And that’s what art is supposed to be and it’s one of the things that only art can do – speak to everyone and speak for everyone. Sometimes art just nails it.
