Still Going On: Why What’s Going On refuses to age
- Isaac Spackman
- 15 hours ago
- 4 min read
Over 50 years old and as relevant as ever, calling What’s Going On a classic would be doing it a disservice – it’s essential. The idea of labelling it a classic implies it holds importance to the past and has done its job. However, I believe it is just as important today as when it first released – and still has much more to say.
As a White, British middle-class twenty-year-old in 2025, it’s not easy to fully comprehend the significance and cultural impact this album had on its release. Marvin Gaye went out there and confronted issues many people at the time preferred to ignore, and in doing so cemented his status as an icon. Fifty-five years on, What’s Going On still resonates, for better or for worse. It feels like the right time to revisit Gaye’s magnum opus with fresh ears.
What’s Going On is widely recognised as the first concept album to come out of soul music. To set the scene, 1971 saw protests against the Vietnam War soar in the US. With the civil rights movement not too distant in the rear window and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination just three years prior, it was still very much a dark time to be Black in America. Marvin Gaye decided to leave his comfortable safety net of love songs and join the likes of Sly Stone and Nina Simone in taking a stand. Whilst often blanketed as a Vietnam War album, the record directly addresses the African American community. After all, one third of U.S. soldiers sent to the war were African American, despite making up just ten percent of the country’s population.
This brings a whole new light to the lyrics of “What’s Happening Brother”. The song tells the story of a soldier returning from the war. Inspired by Gaye’s own brother Frankie, who served three years in Vietnam, he sings “Can't find no work, can't find no job, my friend. Money is tighter than it's ever been. What’s happening brother?” This highlights the disillusionment and disconnect Marvin and many others felt towards the world in 1971 – a sentiment that still resonates today. In “Save The Children”, he sings of his pessimistic view of the world and the future of its youth. With such conflict and drastic polarisation ever present and nobody being held accountable, how can one have hope? A saddening yet familiar story.
Sonically, "What’s Going On" has an instantly recognisable groove. Its funky blend of percussion and bass is ubiquitous and inescapable. Each track transitions into the next so seamlessly that the record feels like one continuous song. One slight critique is that at times it risks slipping into repetitiveness. “God Is Love” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” sound uncannily similar to the album’s title track and opener. However, Gaye’s vocals and lyrics, backed up by David Van De Pitte’s arrangements, are something everybody can connect with. Besides, there are few songs I’d rather have ‘cloned’ than “What’s Going On”.
The semantics of the title of the album and the choice not to include a question mark in it is something I find fascinating. For what reason would Marvin Gaye not pose “what’s going on” as a question? He asks many complicated questions throughout the album – “Who are they to judge us, simply ‘cause our hair is long?” (What’s Going On), “Who really cares to save a world in despair? Who is to blame?” (Save The Children), “War is hell, when will it end? When will people start getting together again?” (What’s Happening Brother) – to name a few. Yet on the title track, when he sings "what’s going on", it is poised as a statement. This is Gaye giving a testimony. He knows what’s going on, and he’s inviting us to listen.
What makes this record such a ‘classic’ is its prevailing relevance. No matter how the world changes, What’s Going On reinterprets itself to answer new questions. The last decade has seen many challenges to the Black community resonant with those of the ‘60s and ‘70s. There was the #oscarssowhite movement highlighting the persistent marginalisation of Black voices in mainstream culture; the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to systemic racism and police brutality; more recently we have seen ICE Agency’s civil rights and border patrol abuses become more prominent; and in the UK, Nigel Farage’s hate-stirring Reform UK remain a present threat to Britain’s multiculturalism as their far-right views continue to gain traction. These examples deserve a lot more depth than this brief acknowledgement, but to cut a long story short, Marvin Gaye’s record is as prescient now as it has ever been.
If we can take anything from What’s Going On, it is Gaye’s understanding of human nature and struggle. The cycles of injustice, apathy, and resistance will occur again and again. He doesn’t offer solutions, confront the powers that be, or preach from a pedestal. That’s someone else’s job. Instead, he pleads. In a way, his tameness is radical. Channelling his inner pain he asks for us to listen, understand, and care. That request is as prominent today as it was fifty-five years ago in 1971. What’s Going On may be a classic of the past, but it belongs just as much to the present, and the future.
“Marvin Gaye made one of the most important bodies of work the world needed to hear and it still shows today.” – Motown Records.
Isaac Spackman
Edited by Isabelle Tu
Photos courtesy of Marvin Gaye, Tom Jim Britt / Michael Ochs Archive, William Volcov / BRAZIL PHOTO PRESS, Getty Images, AFP