What's Going On? - A tribute

I remember being in first year of uni in Sheffield, in halls, when I first heard What’s Going On. At the start of Freshers’ week, I had come armed with my parents mid-80s midi system with ‘automatic’ vinyl player (tonearm spun round to the underside of the record), auxillary Technics separates CD player inherited from a neighbour, a few CDs, a hefty chunk of vinyl, and a lot of opinions around albums. My door was flung open wide on the Sunday afternoon, a selection (probably deliberately eclectic) of soulful house, shoegazing, weird electronica, techno, and the Beach Boys thrown on the platter; me, sat on the bed cross-legged reading Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

If you’d asked me what my favourite albums were, which - to be honest - you wouldn’t have had to do, because I would have volunteered them gladly, and well before the conversation had even turned to music…but if you had asked me, I would have said:

• Pet Sounds
• Loveless
• The Richard D. James Album
• The Man Machine
• Innervisions

or I might have harped on about NuYorican Soul, or Off the Wall, or Screamadelica; or if mix CDs were up for debate, Jeff Mills’ Live at the Liquid Rooms, or the Derrick Carter CD of Back2Basics’ Cut the Crap box set would have put forward. But, in general, at around that time (1999), it would have been the ones above.

I was fairly familiar with Marvin Gaye, growing up with a mum who was a Motown obsessive, but I’d more readily accepted Stevie Wonder’s deeply artistic forays first, perhaps because he had – during my childhood – delved into what a few years later seemed like the worst kind of commercial pop (I’ve since reappraised ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’ as part of the Woman in Red Soundtrack, mainly because it contains the awesome ‘Love Light in Flight’) and - well - I love an underdog. Marvin was always too cool, never an underdog, but I’d mainly heard the singles…Heard it Through the Grapevine, the Onion Song (Marvin’s Tammi Terrell collaborations are the best; their version of California Soul is superlative), Got to Give it Up, Abraham, Martin and John…and also What’s Going On, and Mercy Mercy Me. But the latter two, not in the context of the album itself.

Anyway, I’d struck up a friendship in that first year at Sheffield with a guy called Kanishka, who was on a study abroad year from the University of Maryland. He was also madly into music, and we weren’t far into that first week before he thrust the CD of What’s Going On into my hands and told me to listen to it. Which I did.

That was over 20 year ago now. In the intervening period, I’ve had the pleasure of being introduced to other classic albums and individual tracks; expanded my tastes in musical variety and range; and reformulated my assessment of my top 5 albums/works more often than I can count (including, at times – probably when I was DJing to support myself – decrying the album format entirely, believing – quite misguidedly – that the album format was too monolithic to allow me to paint the picture I wanted to a crowd). (I was ridiculously assured and cerebral in my approach, in other words, although I kept getting bookings because my tones were all Luther Vandross, the Jones Girls, and D-Train).

Through it all, even the bit when I disappeared up my own arse, What’s Going On was a beacon for me – of what the human artistic spirit could achieve. It’s the only album I’ve ever listened to entirely with my eyes closed (I cried at the end). When I’m down, I listen to it. I played it to my then-infant son when things weren’t going so well globally a few years back (along with Songs in the Key of Life…there’s Stevie again). For me, What’s Going On is like the Sistine Chapel of Recorded Music. All of human life is there, in all its glory and reach; its sadness, sereneness, and complexity.

The production itself is a triumph over adversity in its break with convention, weathering and overcoming criticism on all fronts. It was too jazzy-sounding, not commercial enough, and sounded too political. It sounded like a protest record, which it was. But it does so from a position of love, not anger.

Despite that, much of the first side is cut from sorrow, sometimes leaning into despair. There is redemption too, in the faint glimmers of hope, sometimes punctuated by pure, unadulterated joy.

On the point about losing faith in the album format, and in direct contradiction to it, I do remember DJing once in the backroom of the Lescar in Sheffield, and dropping the needle on a vinyl copy of the album (there were no CD decks at the Lescar) at ‘Flying High in a Friendly Sky’, and just letting the whole of the first side play out. Those familiar with the album will know that’s actually four tracks segued together, going through the ‘Save the Children’ (which was the reason I’d decided to play this: it was Children in Need night), then the beautiful ‘God is Love’ (whether you’re religious or not, or even whether you feel any leaning towards the notion of a human spirit or not, there’s something heavenly about this track), then the familiar ‘Mercy, Mercy, Me’, articulating and anticipating ecological awareness and activism years before it was really in the public consciousness.

It’s not just the thematic linking, or even the artful segueing of these tracks that impresses the most, but the way the sequence builds so perfectly in feeling. Master album makers (Brian Wilson, or the Beatles and George Martin) had attempted to combine this thematic connection with well-sequenced musicality that the recording studio allowed, but I’d argue no-one has ever come close to how well this album fits together in both those ways, and emotionally too. We always used to take it in turns to play one or two tracks (usually there was a pair of us DJing at the Lescar that night), but I guarded that tonearm with my life. We were playing the whole of the rest of the side, and everyone would have to listen to it, and that was it.

If Side 1 takes us on a journey that both shows us the scale of our problems, takes us through the deep sorrow this should make us feel, but also offers hope, Side 2 is both more playful (‘Right On’) and yearns even more deeply for a spiritual dimension (‘Wholy Holy’). But for many, it’s the final track that cuts through the ages.

Bands like the Temptations had already begun to take the Motown sound to a new place, their psychedelic funk offering ‘Ball of Confusion’ having incinerated dancefloors the year before What’s Going On was released (although some of it was recorded the same year, 1970). I was actually thinking about songs that shared the album’s characteristics of being a watershed release, and this came to mind…something that was affirmed by the trailer for the 50th Anniversary of What’s Going on being trailed on 6Music, before this track being played at about 7am this morning (Thursday 20 May 2021).

Inner City Blues has the most incredible, hypnotic bass riff, in a way that echoes that trance-like, psychedelic quality of ‘Ball of Confusion’. But again, it’s not angry or despairing in either its tone or its delivery. If anything, and despite saying it all ‘makes [him] wanna holler’ the song conveys a motivational disappointment. Things needed to get better back then, and they certainly need to get better now, whether we’re talking about ecological issues or global social justice.

It’s very hard, in writing, to do justice to a music album, or any artwork really, that you care so deeply about. All I will say is this: if you’ve never heard it, listen to it. And if you have and you love it, listen to it again now. You won’t be disappointed. It’s magical.

What’s Going On (Rhythm ‘N’ Strings Mix)