Douglas Laman Gets A Tune-Up (Entry #3): What's Going On by Marvin Gaye

DOUGLAS LAMAN GETS A TUNE-UP

ENTRY #3: What's Going On by Marvin Gaye

Douglas Laman Gets A Tune-Up is a new weekly series wherein Douglas Laman listens to an album of music he's never fully listened to before (though he may have heard one or two songs from it) and writes up his brief thoughts on it.

For the next entry in this series, we head only a few years after 1967 when The Velvet Underground & Nico was released but we do head into a different genre of music entirely. Marvin Gaye's 1971 album What's Going On clearly belongs to the world of soul music, a genre reliant on African-American culture and one that served as an artistic outlet for African-Americans in both the 20th and 21st century. While American music was still struggling to recognize African-American artists on a regular basis in the 1960's and 1970's, the terrain of soul and jazz music served as one of the few go-to avenues for African-American musicians looking to express themselves in an authentic way.