Song Book 17: On Marvin’s Last Night.

My grandmother wore out the VHS tape. She wore it out then bought another copy, then wore that copy out. If she didn’t die, she would have worn out a third. As I got older, I would see more worn out copies of it in houses in Hilltop, in VHS casings with a metallic cover in bright blue lettering. In gatherings, parties, and cookouts, it was brought out to teach young whippersnappers like myself what music was. Yet every time it was, every time a drunk uncle had to have his rambling soliloquy about how much music was better in his day interrupted by the playing of it, I never got tired of the video.
There were many good to superb performances in that Motown 25 reunion video, a film of an almost infinitely black complex family reunion put to music and stage. Stevie Wonder gave a low key but excellent account of his evolution from child star to world conquering genius. Smokey Robinson was frayed but elegant. The Temptations were at the point where they were a bar vocal group, but they kept time with the Four Tops on their A game. Michael Jackson became a massive pop star by doing the moonwalk in his solo performance; but before that, he was moving in a melody with his brothers. Diana Ross closing the show with the Supremes had every emotion of a turbulent auntie/sister/loved one reunion.
Yet at night, when the cookouts were over and almost everyone was gone, the adults would almost always put the video on again and fixate on one single performance . Both radiatingly gorgeous and possessive of a freebase fried face that had death all over it, Marvin Gaye was the living incarnate of Siqueiros’s Hart Crane, the poet the Mexican realist could not paint because there was too much pain and feeling in his eyes. But if one could not look at Gaye when he came on the stage, one could not turn away when he opened his mouth. Effortlessly riffing on a piano, he gave a short yet concise history of black music, then went into “What’s Going On”, the plea that transformed him from a pop star to a seminal figure in art history.
For if Gaye’s most famous song is anything, it is a plea, an altar call for the understanding of what can be shared human condition; a plea that can be felt in every fiber in its creation. Fusing Gershwin and the conga drums, the Memphis juke joint and the modernist jazz band, corner homie good talking, and layers of different holy gospel chants, What’s Going On is one of the high marks of art in any form . In structure, song, performance, and lyric, Gaye floods the listener with a need to only connect, and connect genuinely, a need made more poignant by the tint of agony that is the backbone for almost all of his best performances.

By the time he had sung that rendition, Marvin had reestablished himself as a leading soul man with Midnight Love, a record that started with him trying to make a commercial record and ended up with him sounding like the smartest, sexiest, and most cosmopolitan funkateer on the planet. After years of public drug dementia and a desolate divorce record that-as good as it was-was unsellable as ice cubes in Antarctica, Gaye had arrived back to the pop charts sober, with an eternally sexy single, and a tone scale funk record record that drew on new wave and reggae and blew every lo-fi electro funk record out of the water. Watching this again, I could easily understand why so many people thought him to be a returning, triumphant force who would dictate popular taste in black music for decades to come.
As we know, however, that didn’t happen. What did happen was Black music’s most troubling tragedy. The freebase cocaine habit that he had picked back up by the time of the Motown 25 show became full blown by his national tour two months later. The results-recorded in swap meet bootlegs everywhere-were a combination of artistic atrophy and mental dementia, culminating with that voice-the greatest and most flexible of any man’s in the history of black music-reduced to an atonal croak. What the world thought to be him resting with his family only turned out to be a frightening acceleration into a conflict with a father who beat him violently and sexually assaulted him. On April 1, after years of abuse, Gaye decided to fight back against his father for the first time. Within minutes of him doing it, his father shot him twice. The next day, he would have been 45 years old.

Listening to it this performance again( and feeling the lump in my throat) I am struck by a deep, deep irony: Marvin Gaye never named the pain of his life clear in his art. Almost every phase he had, every attempt to mask the sorrow in his life, was a persona he couldn’t completely pull off. He was never comfortable as a debonair Motown factory star. His protest record didn’t sound like anything out of agit prop jazz or the black arts movement. The love god image that came from his sex records collapsed in the weight of his own insecurities. The fire and brimstone divorce record he intended to make ended up sounding more like a tribute to her/excoriation of himself.
Yet it is in that failure and what came from it- the contrast of his persona’s and his soul in complex dialogue with( and at times mutiny against) itself- where he created one of the richest and most substantive bodies of work in the history of music. This is where I compare him less to pop stars than to Tolstoy in that they( he and Gaye) created a wealth of complexity in their art forms by letting intent and result contrast. From the collapsed cool of his 60’s Motown records, he picked up the skills to be into the most utilitarian and populist soul man of his era. From the self-punctures in his libidinal records, he created songs of remarkably complex vulnerability. From his anger over what his brother had seen in Vietnam, he created a near-consensus pick for the greatest album in the history of black music.
Yet as much as I would like to write you that Gaye’s legacy is lasting triumph, those images of my grandmother and elders have never left my mind. As I grew older and became a DJ, a music critic and a poet, I learned from them to understand the history of black music. I learned that because it is so close to our survival, because we listen to get through a day, the deaths and pains of the greatest stars are so close to us that we internalize them. I saw elders cry over Donny Hathaway along with the other people in their lives that tried to smile the pain away and failed. I saw elders cry about Phyllis Hyman and Whitney Houston because this knew successful smart sisters who suffered because they weren’t allowed to be themselves.
And those same elders cried over Gaye because they knew too much of his tragedy. They knew of people whose fathers prepared them for nothing for the graveyard. Like Marvin, their loved ones weren’t perfect and some were damaged and did damage in their life( drugs brought out the abuser in him). But listening to the beautiful unanswered prayer in his music-on love, stability, and the human condition-made them think of their own unanswered prayers and flooded them with mercy and pity toward one toward the life of one of the most abused and haunted souls popular culture has ever seen. I think of them as I watch this. Even now, it’s hard to look at the clip of Marvin Gaye in Motown 25. Even now, it’s harder to look away.