What's Going On

As his first self-produced project, Marvin Gaye’s ‘What's Going On’ is a seamless song cycle that blends the foundational soul of the Funk Brothers with sophisticated, jazz-inflected arrangements and Gaye's own layered, ethereal vocals. The album's narrative is told from the perspective of a Vietnam War veteran surveying a landscape of social injustice, poverty, environmental decay, and drug abuse. This thematic depth marked a definitive break from the established Motown formula, establishing a new paradigm for artistic control and social commentary in popular music.