What's Going On Review

Motown built its reputation on singles and Berry Gordy thought this was career suicide, which tells you how far outside the house style it sits. Gaye takes nine songs and lets them bleed into each other without hard stops, so the album moves like one long conversation: a soldier comes home, the neighborhood is broke, the river is poisoned, and the singer keeps asking questions nobody answers.

The playing is the secret. The Funk Brothers are looser than Motown ever let them be, David Van De Pitte's strings arrive like weather rather than decoration, and Gaye stacks his own voice in overlapping layers so the lead and the answer belong to the same man. Half a century of critical writing lands in the same place: this is the moment soul music stopped being product and started being authorship, and the writing never sounds like a lecture because Gaye keeps it at the level of a man talking on a porch.

Several of these were hits and they stand alone perfectly well, but the achievement is the sequence, which is why the whole outranks any single part of it. Nothing here has aged into nostalgia. The questions are still open, and the record still sounds like it is being sung to you rather than at you.