What s Going On

Released on May 21, 1971, What’s Going On is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums ever recorded. It topped Rolling Stone’s revised list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2020, displacing records that had held pole position for decades.

The album was born out of grief, moral outrage, and a determination to remake what Black popular music could say. Marvin Gaye had spent years as a reliable hitmaker within Motown’s assembly-line system, but by 1970 his world had fractured. His beloved duet partner Tammi Terrell had died of a brain tumor in March 1970. Letters from his brother Frankie, who had served in Vietnam, described a war he found senseless and brutal. And the sight of the country turning on its own young people in places like People’s Park in Berkeley had left him struggling to reconcile the America he knew with the violence being committed in its name.

The album is structured as a unified suite rather than a collection of singles. Songs bleed into one another through recurring musical motifs, and the narrative voice of a returning Vietnam veteran threads through the entire record, surveying a homeland in turmoil. The themes span police violence, urban poverty, heroin addiction, ecological destruction, and the need for spiritual renewal. The album produced three consecutive Top 10 pop singles and, after its initial success, Gaye was credited as his own producer, a first for a Motown artist. The Funk Brothers, Motown’s legendary studio band, were finally credited by name on the jacket.

It was added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2003. Its influence on soul, R&B, and popular music broadly is immeasurable, opening the door for politically conscious Black music to be taken seriously as art.