Biog­ra­phy

In his obit­u­ary for the leg­endary soul singer, West describes Mar­vin Gaye as an excel­lent exam­ple of his black intel­lec­tual. Nonethe­less, his appre­ci­a­tion of the artist’s intel­lec­tual and social achieve­ments is lim­ited to What’s Going On. West describes the impor­tance of the album as follows:

“This ground­break­ing album was not only the first con­ceived and enacted by the artist (as opposed to stu­dio staffers), but also the first con­cept album that hung together by means of a set of themes – themes con­cerned with socio-​economic cri­tique and Chris­t­ian outlook.”

To him, the rel­e­vance of What’s Going On con­sisted in the fact that Mar­vin Gaye exploited his gift as a per­former to com­mu­ni­cate his Chris­t­ian mes­sage of love, peace and har­mony. Because his sta­tus as a super­star gave him cred­i­bil­ity to both a main­stream and a R&B audi­ence, the artist was capa­ble of influ­enc­ing both the Amer­i­can soci­ety as well as the black com­mu­nity with his sermon.

Unfor­tu­nately, Cor­nel West neglects to incor­po­rate some cru­cial bio­graph­i­cal facts about Mar­vin Gaye in his analy­sis of What’s Going On. These omit­ted details add up to a more com­plex por­trait of the artist/​intellectual. They reveal the ten­sion between the glam­orous life of the per­former and the moral ways of the priest. West ignores, for instance, that the singer was already heav­ily drug addicted dur­ing the record­ing of What’s Going On. Nor does he men­tion that Mar­vin and his first wife Anna Gordy had extra­mar­i­tal affairs on a reg­u­lar basis. Above all, how­ever, West com­pletely ignores Gaye’s con­tin­u­ous fight with his father who was a preacher in the House of God church. All these fact inevitably sug­gest that Chris­tian­ity, and the expec­ta­tions and val­ues that it preaches, were a prob­lem as much as a solu­tion to the singer.

Whereas these per­sonal strug­gles only appeared in the back­ground on What’s Going On, they are fore­grounded on Let’s Get it On. The lat­ter album doc­u­ments Gaye’s dif­fi­cul­ties to com­bine spir­i­tu­al­ity and sex­u­al­ity. Although the mes­sage of the album is as explicit as that of What’s Going On, the singer now not just preaches his ser­mon but also allows us to see his per­sonal doubts, sins and temp­ta­tions. This shift is lit­er­ally reflected in the strange record­ing his­tory of the album’s title song. At first – and I will play a clip of this now – the song tries to recre­ate the for­mula of What’s Going On. As you can hear, this song ini­tially had a purely polit­i­cal mean­ing. “Under­stand­ing and broth­er­hood” Mar­vin sings “Every­body ought to try and do some good”. Gaye once again tried to con­vince the world of the need for love, peace and har­mony. After meet­ing his future sec­ond wife – sev­en­teen year old Janis Hunter – dur­ing the record­ing ses­sion, how­ever, the song instan­ta­neously acquired an extra layer (another clip). Super­fi­cially, explicit sex­u­al­ity now appears to be the mes­sage of ‘Let’s Get it On’ and it is for this exact rea­son that Cor­nel West refuses to acknowl­edge its intel­lec­tual value. Closer inspec­tion, how­ever, reveals that it is actu­ally the ten­sion between the spir­i­tu­al­ity, and sen­su­al­ity that is the main motive of Gaye’s later works.

What this exam­ple shows is the fact that for real, sit­u­ated indi­vid­u­als such as Mar­vin Gaye – rather than the abstrac­tion that The Black Intel­lec­tual actu­ally is – the Chris­t­ian and the per­for­ma­tive African-​American tra­di­tion are not as homoge­nous as West seems to sug­gest. They are two sep­a­rate dis­cur­sive prac­tices, each with their own norms and stan­dards. For this rea­son, it does not suf­fice to sit­u­ate the sub­ject between two con­flict­ing per­sonae. It is nec­es­sary to mul­ti­ply and com­pli­cate these roles even fur­ther. Mul­ti­track record­ing gave Mar­vin Gaye the oppor­tu­nity to lit­er­ally do this. On Let’s Get it On the con­flict­ing voices that stem from dis­cur­sive ten­sions become appar­ent and even sound har­mo­nized. The tech­nol­ogy proved to be capa­ble of bring­ing together oppo­si­tions that the sub­ject Mar­vin Gaye failed to reconcile.

As argued above, the value of Cor­nel West’s essay con­sists in the fact that he does not sit­u­ate the intel­lec­tual as part of any par­tic­u­lar dis­course but in the strug­gle between two dis­cur­sive prac­tices. How­ever, Let’s Get It On teaches us that his over­sim­pli­fied jux­ta­po­si­tion of Amer­i­can soci­ety and black com­mu­nity sim­ply rein­scribes the tra­di­tional dichotomy between mind and body – or knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence – on a dis­cur­sive level. As a result, every­thing that is not aca­d­e­mic is homog­e­nized under the title per­for­mance. Sit­u­at­ing the black intel­lec­tual between more, and more spe­cific prac­tices, could cre­ate a way out of think­ing in terms of such dualities.

Con­clu­sion

Whereas Cor­nel West describes his dual­ist model for future intel­lec­tu­als, Mar­vin Gaye per­forms his plu­ral­ist alter­na­tive. The artist was the arena for mul­ti­ple, not just two, con­flict­ing dis­cur­sive prac­tices. Nonethe­less, as his albums prove, human beings are not the exclu­sive site of these con­fronta­tions. Every other medial expres­sion can ful­fill the same func­tion and some­times they are up to the task even bet­ter. In fact, I would claim that is actu­ally the tech­ni­cal medium that allows us to view the human sub­ject differently.

One could even argue, that Mar­vin Gaye’s records accom­plishes things that he could no longer achieve as a per­son. The suc­cess of records like What’s Going On and Let’s Get it On actu­ally con­sists in the fact that they rec­on­cile dif­fer­ent per­sonae and could thereby func­tion as a non-​utopian hori­zon for per­sonal and social change. In fact, these albums har­mo­nized the dis­so­nant voices and their cor­re­spond­ing dis­cur­sive prac­tices that the singer would con­tinue to strug­gle with the rest of his life. I would argue – and this is also my start­ing point for fur­ther dis­cus­sion – this even­tu­ally leads up to the con­clu­sion that a human sub­ject has no pri­or­i­tized sta­tus over other medial expres­sions. Each record, each movie, each book and each pic­ture can be con­ceived as a space where dif­fer­ent per­sonae are con­fronted with one another and can there­fore func­tion as actors of social transformation.