Album of the Week: 'What's Going On?'

A while back, I ranted, without much control, on the subject of 'New Atheism'. Listening to 'What's Going On?' this week, I realised that those words were wasted (well, more than usual) given that the stupidity of the New Atheists can be summed up by the fact that they refuse to recognise the difference between the Christianity of Pope Benedict XIV and Marvin Gaye.

'What's Going On?' is correctly considered to be one of the greatest albums ever made, and there is a narrative traditionally associated with it, usually featuring the unheard-of political radicalism of it, as a Motown release. The film Dreamgirls, about Diana Ross and the Supremes, features a subplot where a Gaye soundalike's vision rubs up against the boss of the Motown-alike record label - leading 'Gaye' down a path of heroin use, and towards death. The inanity of the music that the soundalike produces is hilarious - 90% of the lyrics being the words "peace and love" - and this is before we take into account that 'Gaye' is played by the foul Eddie Murphy - but I digress...

The real surprise of the album, after imbibing the traditional narrative, and hits used for the illustration of it, is the level of introspection, and religious content that 'What's Going On?' contains. The left-wing politics is wonderful - gloriously earnest, exalting "picket lines/and picket signs" and those whose "hair is long". These gems are sanctified and sillified by the inclusion of a recurring prayer that begins "Don't go and talk about my father/God is my friend (Jesus is my friend)", which puts one in mind of both Gaye spoiling for a pub fight with a trash-talking atheist, and Gaye's own father, who tragically shot his son, depriving the world of black music of one of its greatest stylists, and perhaps its greatest singer since Paul Robeson. The music is profoundly soft, unthreatening, with melotrons and flutes spiralling to the heavens, drums that resemble a babbling brook, and grand, simple strings.

Listening to the album, the picture that emerges (much like that of Thom Yorke's 'The Eraser') is of a troubled soul, projecting his crises onto a disturbing, broken world. But a continuity exists with his earlier work, which unlike that of Thom Yorke, is not entirely depressing. So the lush, swinging 'Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)' comes on like a love song, then begins "Oh, mercy mercy me/things ain't what they used to be/Where did all the blue skies go?/Poisoned is the wind that flows/From the North and South". On 'Right On', he bemoans inequality, and his own addiction to easy living and nightlife (and perhaps cocaine - I don't have a good Gaye timeline), despite the horror of the world.

The litany of apocalyptic scenarios contrasted with appeals to God's love present us with something more complex than simple love songs, or political tracts. We're left with love songs which accept a world where love is crushed under the jackboot, songs of beauty and ecstacy in a world of squallor, songs that appeal to our highest impulses, while accepting that the easy way out is very easy indeed. It deserves its status, and deserves better than Eddie Murphy.