What's Going On is the eleventh studio album by the American soul singer Marvin Gaye. It was released on May 21, 1971, by the Motown Records subsidiary label Tamla. Recorded between 1970 and 1971 in sessions at Hitsville U.S.A., Golden World, United Sound Studios in Detroit, and at The Sound Factory in West Hollywood, California, it was Gaye's first album to credit him as producer and to credit Motown's in-house session musicians, known as the Funk Brothers.
What's Going On is a concept album with most of its songs segueing into the next and has been categorized as a song cycle. The narrative established by the songs is told from the point of view of a Vietnam veteran returning to his home country to witness hatred, suffering, and injustice. Gaye's introspective lyrics explore themes of drug abuse, poverty, and the Vietnam War. He has also been credited with promoting awareness of ecological issues before the public outcry over them had become prominent ("Mercy Mercy Me").
What's Going On stayed on the Billboard Top LPs for over a year and became Gaye's second number-one album on Billboards Soul LPs chart, where it stayed for nine weeks, and on the No. 2 spot for another 12 weeks, respectively. The title track, which had been released in January 1971 as the album's lead single, hit number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and held the top position on Billboards Soul Singles chart five weeks running. The follow-up singles "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" and "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" also reached the top 10 of the Hot 100, making Gaye the first male solo artist to place three top ten singles on the Hot 100 from one album.
The album was an immediate commercial and critical success, and came to be viewed by music historians as a classic of 1970s soul and significant to the development of progressive soul. Multiple critics, musicians, and many in the general public consider What's Going On to be one of the greatest albums of all time and a landmark recording in popular music. In 1985, writers on British music weekly the NME voted it the best album of all time. In 2020 and 2023 revisions, Rolling Stone listed What's Going On as the greatest album of all time.
Background
left|alt=An ornate white building|thumb|Gaye experienced personal and professional turmoil in the late 1960s and part of his refocusing on music was attending concerts from the [[Detroit Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall at the Max M. Fisher Music Center (pictured2008).]]
By the end of the 1960s, Marvin Gaye had fallen into a deep depression following the brain tumor diagnosis of his Motown singing partner Tammi Terrell, the failure of his marriage to Anna Gordy, a growing dependency on cocaine, troubles with the IRS, and struggles with Motown Records, the label he had signed with in 1960. One night, while holed up at a Detroit apartment, Gaye attempted suicide with a handgun, only to be stopped by Berry Gordy's father.
Gaye started to experience more international success around this time as both a solo artist with hits such as "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and "Too Busy Thinking About My Baby" and as a dual artist with Tammi Terrell, but Gaye said during this time that he felt he "didn't deserve" his success and he felt like "a puppet - Berry's puppet, Anna's puppet. I had a mind of my own and I wasn't using it." In March 1970, Gaye's singing partner Terrell died of a brain tumor. The singer responded to Terrell's death by refusing to perform onstage for several years. In January 1970, Motown released Gaye's next studio album, That's the Way Love Is, but Gaye refused to promote the recording, choosing to stay at home. During this secluded period, Gaye ditched his previous clean-cut image to grow a beard, and preferred to wear sweatsuits instead of dress suits and sweaters.
The singer also got back in touch with his spirituality and also attended several concerts held by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which had been used for several Motown recordings in the 1960s. Around the spring of 1970, Gaye also began seriously pursuing a career in football with the professional football team the Detroit Lions of the NFL, even working out with the Eastern Michigan Eagles football team. However, his pursuit of a tryout was stopped after the owner of the team advised him that any future injury would derail his career. Gaye befriended three of the Lions teammates, Mel Farr, Charlie Sanders and Lem Barney, as well as then-Detroit Pistons star Dave Bing.
Conception
alt=Benson in a suit looking sideways|thumb|upright=0.8|Fellow soul singer Renaldo Benson (pictured ) inspired Gaye to write about political themes and social change in his music.
While traveling on his tour bus with the Four Tops on May 15, 1969, Four Tops member Renaldo "Obie" Benson witnessed an act of police brutality and violence committed on anti-war protesters who had been protesting at Berkeley's People's Park in what was later termed as "Bloody Thursday". Benson later told author Ben Edmonds, "I saw this and started wondering 'what was going on, what is happening here?' One question led to another. Why are they sending kids far away from their families overseas? Why are they attacking their own kids in the street?" Returning to Detroit, Motown songwriter Al Cleveland wrote and composed a song based on his conversations with Benson of what he had seen in Berkeley. Benson sent the song to the Four Tops but his bandmates turned the song down. Benson said, "My partners told me it was a protest song. I said 'no man, it's a love song, about love and understanding. I'm not protesting. I want to know what's going on.
Benson offered the song to Marvin Gaye when he participated in a golf game with the singer. Returning to Gaye's home outside Outer Drive, Benson played the song to Gaye on his guitar. Gaye felt the song's moody flow would be perfect for the Originals. Benson eventually convinced Gaye that it was his song. The singer responded by asking for partial writing credit, which Benson allowed. Gaye added new musical composition, a new melody and lyrics that reflected Gaye's own disgust. Benson said later that Gaye tweaked and enriched the song, "added some things that were more ghetto, more natural, which made it seem like a story and not a song ... we measured him for the suit and he tailored the hell out of it." During this time, Gaye had been deeply affected by letters shared between him and his brother after he had returned from service in the Vietnam War over the treatment of Vietnam veterans.
Gaye had also been deeply affected by the social ills plaguing the United States at the time, and covered the track "Abraham, Martin & John", in 1969, which became a UK hit for him in 1970. Gaye cited the 1965 Watts riots as a pivotal moment in his life in which he asked himself, "with the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?" One night, he called Berry Gordy about doing a protest record, to which Gordy chastised him, "Marvin, don't be ridiculous. That's taking things too far." The singer's brother Frankie wrote in his 2003 autobiography, My Brother Marvin, that while reuniting at their parents' home in Washington, D.C., Frankie's recalling of his tenure at the war made both brothers cry. At one point, Marvin sat propped up in a bed with his hands in his face. Afterwards, Gaye told his brother: "I didn't know how to fight before, but now I think I do. I just have to do it my way. I'm not a painter. I'm not a poet. But I can do it with music."
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Marvin Gaye discussed what had shaped his view on more socially conscious themes in music and the conception of his eleventh studio album:
Recording
alt=Two two-storey houses with signs marking one as Hitsville U.S.A.|thumb|Gaye recorded the album in Detroit at Motown's in-house studio, [[Hitsville U.S.A. (since converted into a museum, pictured 2006).]]
On June 1, 1970, Gaye entered Motown's Hitsville U.S.A. studios to record "What's Going On". Immediately after learning about the song, many of Motown's musicians, known as The Funk Brothers noted that there was a different approach with Gaye's record from that used on other Motown recordings, and Gaye complicated matters by bringing in only a few of the members while bringing his own recruits, including drummer Chet Forest. Longtime Funk Brothers members Jack Ashford, James Jamerson and Eddie Brown participated in the recording. Jamerson was pulled into the recording studio by Gaye after he located Jamerson playing with a local band at a blues bar and Eli Fontaine, the saxophonist behind "Baby, I'm For Real", also participated in the recording. Jamerson, who could not sit properly on his seat after arriving to the session drunk, performed his bass riffs, written for him by the album's arranger David Van De Pitte, on the floor. Fontaine's alto saxophone riff to open the song was not originally intended. When Gaye heard the playback of what Fontaine thought was simply a demo, Gaye instantly decided that the riff was the ideal way to start the song. When Fontaine said he was "just goofing around", Gaye being pleased with the results replied, "Well, you goof off exquisitely. Thank you."
The laid-back sessions of the single were credited to lots of "marijuana smoke and rounds of Scotch". Gaye's trademark multi-layering vocal approach came off initially as an accident by engineers Steve Smith and Kenneth Sands. Gaye continued to record his own compositions during this time, some of which later made his 1973 album, Let's Get It On. Motown executive Harry Balk recalled trying to get Gordy to release the song at the end of the year, to which Gordy replied to him, "that Dizzy Gillespie stuff in the middle, that scatting, it's old." Gordy mentioned later that he feared no one would buy songs with a jazz influence after his attempt to be a record store owner of a jazz shop folded after a year, years prior to starting Motown. Most of Motown's Quality Control Department team also turned the song down, with Balk later stating that "they were used to the 'baby baby' stuff, and this was a little hard for them to grasp."
With the help of Motown sales executive Barney Ales, Harry Balk got the song released to record stores on January 20, 1971, sending 100,000 copies of the song without Gordy's knowledge, with another 100,000 copies sent after that success. gave it a cohesive feel and was one of R&B's first concept albums, described as "a groundbreaking experiment in collating a pseudo-classical suite of free-flowing songs."
The Absolute Sound described the album as "a brilliant psychedelic soul song-cycle".
Release and promotion
Released on May 21, 1971, What's Going On shipped gold upon its release and became Gaye's first Top 10 entry on the Billboard Top LPs, peaking at number six. It stayed on the chart over a year, selling some two million copies within twelve months. It was Motown's (and Gaye's) best-selling album to that date – until he released Let's Get It On in 1973. It also became Gaye's second number-one album on Billboards Soul LPs chart, where it stayed for nine weeks, remaining on the Billboard Soul LPs chart for 58 weeks throughout 1971 and 1972. The title track, which had been released in January 1971 as the lead single to promote the album, sold more than 200,000 copies within its first week and 2.5 million by the end of the year.
Critical reception
What's Going On was generally well received by contemporary critics. Writing for Rolling Stone in 1971, Vince Aletti praised Gaye's thematic approach towards social and political concerns, while discussing the surprise of Motown releasing such an album. In a joint review of What's Going On and Stevie Wonder's Where I'm Coming From, Aletti wrote, "Ambitious, personal albums may be a glut on the market elsewhere, but at Motown they're something new ... the album as a whole takes precedence, absorbing its own flaws. There are very few performers who could carry a project like this off. I've always admired Marvin Gaye, but I didn't expect that he would be one of them. Guess I seriously underestimated him. It won't happen again." Billboard described the record as "a cross between Curtis Mayfield and that old Motown spell and outdoes anything Gaye's ever done". Time magazine hailed it as a "vast, melodically deft symphonic pop suite". The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau was less impressed. Writing in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), he deemed it both a "groundbreaking personal statement" and a Berry Gordy product, baited by three highly original singles but marred elsewhere by indistinct music and indulgent use of David Van De Pitte's strings, which Christgau called "the lowest kind of movie-background dreck". In MusicHound R&B (1998), Gary Graff said What's Going On was "not just a great Gaye album but is one of the great pop albums of all time", and Pitchforks Tom Breihan calls it a prog-soul masterpiece. BBC Music's David Katz described the album as "one of the greatest albums of all time, and nothing short of a masterpiece" and compared it to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue by saying "its non-standard musical arrangements, which heralded a new sound at the time, gives it a chilling edge that ultimately underscores its gravity, with subtle orchestral enhancements offset by percolating congas, expertly layered above James Jamerson's bubbling bass". In his 1994 review of Gaye's re-issues, Chicago Tribune reviewer Greg Kot described the album as "soul music's first 'art' album, an inner-city response to the Celtic mysticism of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, the psychedelic pop of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [and] the rewired blues of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited."
A remastered deluxe edition with 28 additional tracks was released on May 31, 2011, to similar acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 100, based on ten reviews.
Accolades
In 1985, writers on British music weekly the NME voted it the best album of all time. What's Going On was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. The album's title track was ranked number four on Rolling Stones list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in the original 2004 ranking and the 2010 revision. The publication ranked the song number six on its updated 2021 list and its 2024 revision, and in 2025, it ranked the song at number 15 on its list of "The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time." A 1999 critics' poll conducted by British newspaper The Guardian named it the "Greatest Album of the 20th Century". In 1997, What's Going On was named the 17th greatest album of all time in a poll conducted in the United Kingdom by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 1997, The Guardian ranked the album number one on its list of the 100 Best Albums Ever. In 1998 Q magazine readers placed it at number 97, while in 2001 the TV network VH1 placed it at number 4. In 2003, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. What's Going On was ranked number 6 on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, one of three Gaye albums to be included, succeeded by 1973's Let's Get It On (number 165) and 1978's Here, My Dear (number 462). The album is Gaye's highest-ranking entry on the list, as well as several other publications' lists. In a revised 2020 list, this time voted on by musicians instead of music critics, the album moved up to the top spot, replacing the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
{|class="wikitable"
|+Accolades for What's Going On
|-
!scope="col"| Publication
!scope="col"| Country
!scope="col"| Accolade
!scope="col"| Year
!scope="col"| Rank
|-
| Bill Shapiro
| rowspan=14|United States
| The Top 100 Rock Compact Discs
| 1991
| align="center"|*
|-
| Jimmy Guteman
| The Best Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time
| 1992
| align="center"|*
|-
| Chris Smith
| 101 Albums That Changed Popular Music
| 2009
| align="center"|*
|-
| Elvis Costello (Vanity Fair, Issue No. 483)
| Costello's 500
| 2000
| align="center"|*
|-
| Chuck Eddy
| The Accidental Evolution of Rock'n'Roll
| 1997
| align="center"|*
|-
| Consequence of Sound
| Top 100 Albums Ever
| 2010
| align="center"|19
|-
| Consequence
| 100 Greatest Albums of All Time
| 2022
| align="center"|9
|-
| Dave Marsh & Kevin Stein
| The 40 Best of Album Chartmakers by Year
| 1981
| align="center"|7
|-
| Paste
| 300 Greatest Albums of all-time
| 2024
| align="center"|13
|-
| Pitchfork
| Top 100 Albums of the 1970s
| 2004
| align="center"|49
|-
| Rolling Stone
| The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
| 2003
| align="center"|*
|-
| Time
| Top 100 Albums of All Time
| 2006
| align="center"|
|-
| NME
|rowspan=2|United Kingdom
| All Times Top 100 Albums
| 2013
| align="center"|25
|-
|Waxx Lyrical
|Australia
|Record Of The Month
|2023
|
|-
|align="center" colspan="7" style="font-size: 8pt"| (*) designates lists that are unordered.
|-
|}
Track listing
Credits as shown in the 1971 original album liner notes release.
Personnel
- All lead vocals by Marvin Gaye
- Produced by Marvin Gaye
- Members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Conducted and Arranged by David Van De Pitte
- Backing vocals:
- Marvin Gaye
- The Andantes (Jackie Hicks, Marlene Barrow, and Louvain Demps)
- Mel Farr, Charlie Sanders and Lem Barney of the Detroit Lions
- Dave Bing of the Detroit Pistons
- Bobby Rogers of The Miracles
- Elgie Stover
- Kenneth Stover
- Strings, woodwinds and brass
- Gordon Staples, Zinovi Bistritzky, Beatriz Budinzky, Richard Margitza, Virginia Halfmann, Felix Resnick, Alvin Score, Lillian Downs, James Waring – violin
- Edouard Kesner, Meyer Shapiro, David Ireland, Nathan Gordon – viola
- Italo Babini, Thaddeus Markiewicz, Edward Korkigan – cello
- Max Janowsky – double bass
- Carole Crosby – harp
- Dayna Hardwick, William Perich – flute
- Larry Nozero, Angelo Carlisi, George Benson, Tate Houston – saxophone
- John Trudell, Maurice Davis – trumpet
- Nilesh Pawar – oboe
- Carl Raetz – trombone
- The Funk Brothers – Instrumentation, spoken interlude ("What's Going On") and solo horns
- Eli Fountain – alto saxophone "What's Going On"
- Wild Bill Moore – tenor saxophone "Mercy Mercy Me"
- Marvin Gaye – piano, Mellotron ("Mercy Mercy Me"), box drum ("What's Going On")
- Johnny Griffith – celeste, additional keyboards
- Earl Van Dyke – additional keyboards
- Jack Brokensha – vibraphone, percussion
- Joe Messina, Robert White – electric guitar
- James Jamerson – bass guitar "What's Going On", "What's Happening Brother", "Flyin' High", "Save the Children", "God Is Love", and the b-side "Sad Tomorrows"
- Bob Babbitt – bass guitar "Mercy Mercy Me", "Right On", "Wholy Holy" and "Inner City Blues"
- Chet Forest – drums
- Jack Ashford – tambourine, percussion
- Eddie "Bongo" Brown – bongos, congas
- Earl DeRouen – bongos and congas "Right On"
- Bobbye Hall – bongos "Inner City Blues"
- Katherine Marking – graphic design
- Alana Coghlan – graphic design
- John Matousek – mastering
- Vic Anesini – Digital Remastering
- James Hendin – Photography
- Curtis McNair – Art Direction
Charts
Weekly charts
{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"
|+1971 weekly chart performance for What's Going On
! scope="col"| Chart (1971)
! scope="col"| Peak<br />position
|-
!scope="row"|Canadian RPM Albums Chart
| style="text-align:center;" |37
|-
!scope="row"|US Billboard Pop Albums
| style="text-align:center;" |6
|-
!scope="row"|US Billboard Top Soul Albums
| style="text-align:center;" |1
|}
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|+1984 weekly chart performance for What's Going On
! scope="col"| Chart (1984)
! scope="col"| Peak<br />position
|-
!scope="row"|US Billboard Pop Albums
| style="text-align:center;" |154
|}
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|+1996 weekly chart performance for What's Going On
! scope="col"| Chart (1996)
! scope="col"| Peak<br />position
|-
!scope="row"|UK Albums (OCC)
| style="text-align:center;" |56
|}
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|+2006 weekly chart performance for What's Going On
! scope="col"| Chart (2006)
! scope="col"| Peak<br />position
|-
!scope="row"|Irish Albums
| style="text-align:center;" |64
|}
{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center;"
|+2025 weekly chart performance for What's Going On
! scope="col"| Chart (2025)
! scope="col"| Peak<br />position
|-
! scope="row"| Greek Albums (IFPI)
| 13
|}
Year-end charts
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|+1971 year-end chart performance for What's Going On
! scope="col"| Chart (1971)
! scope="col"| Position
|-
!scope="row"|US Billboard Pop Albums
| style="text-align:center;" |52
|-
!scope="row"|US Billboard Top Soul Albums
| style="text-align:center;" |3
|}
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|+1972 year-end chart performance for What's Going On
! scope="col"| Chart (1972)
! scope="col"| Position
|-
!scope="row"|US Billboard Top Soul Albums
| style="text-align:center;" |27
|}
Certifications
See also
- List of 1970s albums considered the best
- List of number-one R&B albums of 1971 (U.S.)
- What's Going On Live, a 2019 album
References
Sources
External links
- "Marvin Gaye: What's Going On Now"—an episode of the BBC World Service radio program The Documentary on the making of the album, on the 50th anniversary of its release