6. Marvin GayeWhat’s Going On
I’ve talked about it to death, and everything’s been said about it already. but What’s Going On is very much my favourite album of all time. For all its grandiosity, for how cheesy and on the nose it is, it’s just undeniable. Undeniable. The performance and the compassion of the songs is just undeniable. It really is an amazing album. I love that the first side is basically one long song. I love that in general, but this is the most effective application of that. Gaye’s voice is just impeccable, one of the smoothest, best recorded voices ever. And the instrumentals that go alongside it are just huge, an amazing sounding album.
What’s Going On has one of the best endings ever. You’ve got ‘Inner City Blues’, one of the best grooves ever, and then it peters out, and we have a reprisal of the very opening. But that in turn also just fades out, and instead, you have an anti-ending. Instead of a big finale there’s just a fade out, where it’s almost as if the music’s riding out into the sunset. It’s a bit like the end of The Searchers, the John Ford movie. You have an echo of the beginning, that just turns into a gradual slithering away.
