‘What’s Going On’
A Reason To Smile
This week’s reason to smile is an American treasure. It’s also a reason to think and reflect. The R&B/soul classic “What’s Going On” was released 53 years ago.
When Marvin Gaye wrote the song, Motown Records originally shelved it, because the label’s founder, Berry Gordy, said he didn’t understand it. When it finally was released, the single and the album of the same name became huge hits and among the most acclaimed titles in American music. Rolling Stone voted the album “What’s Going On” number one in its “Five Hundred Greatest Albums of All Time.”
The title track is about an anti-war protest at Berkeley in 1969 where police were beating demonstrators. Indeed, a lot was going on back then that didn’t make sense. Our culture was seemingly turned on its head amid an unpopular war, police brutality, and race riots. Our environment was being ravaged by corporations polluting our lakes and rivers. A lot of us were asking, “What’s Going On?”
In 2019, a video of the song was produced that interspersed current events with the original song, which unfortunately shows that in the 50 years since the song was released, Marvin Gaye’s lyrics are as relevant as ever.
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Stay Steady,
Dan
One of my favorite songs since it was released. It is sad that it is still relevant today and that we haven't grown past these problems. Humans are the broken link in the chain of nature.
Wasn’t that a time, indeed. Yet as one who was born exactly five months before the Enola Gay opened her bomb bay doors over Hiroshima and changed the world forever, I sometimes feel I’ve lived my whole life in one storm or another. Other generations have surely felt the like - our capacity for creating storms goes back to the dawn of what we call civilization. But as a plank owner in the first generation to grow up knowing that one of those storms could end us, the storms that didn’t but could have took on an added dimension of madness. And we’re still at it. We know what’s going on - we always have. We just can’t seem to stop it.