Lest we forget the events of 1984, be reminded that it was the year that bore the famine that took the lives of one million Ethiopians in their native land. It was the year the United States championed space travel with the launch of the Discovery. It was the year that over 3,600 runners carried the fire of the gods to Santa Monica, opening the Summer Olympics. In this same year, Marvin Gaye was shot dead by his own father.
The prologue and epilogue of Marvin Gaye’s life were peculiar in that his birthday and the day that he died were a day apart. His death on April Fool’s Day took the tragedy to a whole new level of strange. When the news broke, the initial thought of his demise, a hoax, spread like a YouTube meme.
It’s too easy to judge a man by his downfall. Although Marvin Gaye is not exempt from judgment, he left a living legacy that remains branded music history, to this day. Press rewind from the untimely death to a life accentuated with a golden falsetto. Before he got his due for “Sexual Healing,” he was courting Motown devotees with gospelly ballads from the Motherland of Soul Music—Detroit.
Like a fairytale, Marvin Gaye’s tenure with Motown went from janitor to the undisputed Prince of Motown. I often wonder, what if I had lived during the era when he stole the hearts of women? With his solo hits like “Pride and Joy” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” surely there were men who secretly wanted to be him.
Civil rights. War. Poverty. Gaye’s songs took a left turn recanting all the ills that plagued America. These reflections were immortalized in his eleventh studio album, What’s Going On. Drug Abuse. Vietnam. Death. The single of the same name were cries of despair interwoven with thoughtful instrumentals. The Ghetto. Recession. Unemployment. “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)” was a wake up call for the Powers-That-Were. Loneliness. Depression. Hope. Nevertheless, Marvin kept his optimism in tact.
It’s been over two decades since Motown’s Golden Boy crossed over. It was by no means an absolute end, though. Marvin Gaye has become self-referential and omnipresent but not god-like. He’s meta. It’s effortless to connect him to Prince (Nona, “Love Sign”), that hip restaurant here at his birthplace (DC!), and everything in between. And how about Alice in Chains? No one could have imagined so close a degree of separation provided that the band recorded music in his old studio.
Marvin Gaye would have been seventy-three years old on Monday. But his golden falsetto never aged. He just has that kind of effect.
