Devastated by the death in early 1970 of his former singing partner, Tammi Terrell, and contemplating giving up music altogether, Marvin Gaye began the new decade disconsolate and directionless. His two big hits of the previous year — Too Busy Thinking About My Baby and That’s the Way Love Is — had consolidated his reputation as a pop-soul hit machine, but the singer yearned for something more. It arrived in the shape of What’s Going On, a song conceived by the Four Tops’ Renaldo Benson and the Motown songwriter

Al Cleveland, who approached Gaye seeking his contribution. Inspired in part by the letters Gaye was receiving from his soldier brother Frankie in Vietnam, but also by social inequality and racial prejudice, the downward spiral of poverty, crime and drugs, his own relationship with his father, his crumbling marriage and his restless spirituality, the singer stamped his troubled state of mind on the song, making each verse a plea — “Mother, mother / There’s too many of you crying / Brother, brother, brother / There’s far too many of you dying” — that was both profoundly personal and deliberately political. Structurally as well as lyrically, the song was a radical departure for Gaye. In the background can be heard a party, from which Gaye deliberately excludes himself; the chord structures are free-jazz-like in their meandering informality; and the harmonies, chiefly sung by Gaye himself, are almost like separate lead vocal parts, swooping in and out of the main melody. The Motown boss, Berry Gordy, was appalled by what he heard, and refused to release the song. Gaye refused to back down, and Gordy’s surrender — and the song’s huge success when it was released as a single in January 1971 — freed Gaye creatively and professionally, as well as liberating other musicians such as Stevie Wonder to chart new and more experimental and polemical paths. Of all the many classic protest songs from that era in soul music, What’s Going On stands out for another reason: its message may be urgent, but musically it is serene and calming. If any further proof were needed of Gaye’s genius, this juxtapositioning is it.

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