“That double lead voice was a mistake on my part […] Marvin had cut two lead vocals, and wanted me to prepare a tape with the rhythm track up the middle and each of his vocals on separate tracks so he could compare them. Once I played that two-track mix on a mono machine and he heard both voices at the same time by accident.” (Sands qtd. in Edmonds 2001: 121–122)

Gaye liked this side-effect to such an extent that he not only decided to keep it, but pushed it to the extremes on his next album also titled What’s Going On. No longer content with the mere duplication of the single version, the artist multiplied his voice several times on the final mix of title track and the other songs on the album. After the release of What’s Going On, these harmonic, multilayered vocals quickly became Marvin Gaye’s hallmark style.

Although the singer and the engineer never planned to record them as such, the strange duet did not fall from the sky either. I would argue that the occurrence of the singer’s and engineer’s fortunate accident was due to an excess rather than a lack of talent. This mistake builds on Gaye and Sand’s respective expertise and skill sets. To use philosophical jargon: their fortunate accident was not random, it was contingent .

Marvin Gaye – who produced the album himself – and his team of musicians and engineers were engaged in many experiments with the sound recording technology available to them. They wanted to record an album that sound different from anything else on the market at the time. One of the biggest challenges that they faced was a way to make What’s Going On sound like one cohesive unit rather than a collection of songs. Gaye wanted to eliminate the cuts between the individual tracks so that the album flowed continuously. While conductor and arranger David van dePitte suggested the use of so-called segues to connect the individual songs, the sound engineers came up with a different solution:

“The studio technology was still pretty primitive […] To edit, you had to physically cut the tape with a blade. So when the basic rhythm tracks were done, Ken Sands and Cal Harris took the multi-tracks and edited the entire album together by hand. It was quite an accomplishment.” (Smith qtd. in Edmonds 2001: 167–168)

After they cut and pasted the entire album together, Sands and Harris overdubbed the strings and horns directly onto the master mix.

There is no causal relation between the engineers’ experiments and the accident that occurred during the “What’s Going On” sessions Nonetheless, I believe such innovations testify to an openness that is needed to recognize such fortunate contingencies when they occur. In a more traditional recording session, the creative potential of the same event would probably have been dismissed or even gone unnoticed.

Marvin Gaye’s extraordinary vocal talents were also essential to the occurrence of this particular accident. A lesser singer simply would not have pulled it off. Gaye originally intended to have The Originals – a male vocal group that he occasionally wrote and produced for – to record “What’s Going On”. Like many other Motown acts, such as The Temptations and The Four Tops, the members of The Originals all covered a different range in the spectrum. Gaye’s own voice, however, could cover the entire range. By multilayering his voice, multitrack recording rendered other singers obsolete. Gaye did not need anyone else to record complex harmonies any longer. Through the doubling, tripling and sometimes even quadrupling of his voice, multi-track recording made it possible for the artist to sing the different voices on What’s Going all by himself.

“His multitracked voices were startling. He’d become a one-man Moonglows, a one-man Originals, singing duets and trios with himself, juxtaposing his silky falsetto and sandpapery midrange, weaving the fabric of his voices into a tapestry of contrasting shapes and colors.” (Ritz 149)

Apart from the skills and talents of everyone involved, “What’s Going On”’s duet between Gaye and himself also presupposes the multitrack technology – an eight-track recorder to be precise – itself. It might sound obvious, but it is crucial to acknowledge that Sands and Gaye would have never stumbled upon it on a typewriter, or even a single tape deck. The mistake now known as What’s Going On is part of a complex constellation that consists of the artist, musicians, engineers, and technology.

Occasionally, the results of mistakes are much more interesting than those of hard work. Marvin Gaye’s hallmark album What’s Going On (1971) serves as one of those miraculous examples of serendipity. During the mixing sessions of the title song and first single in 1970, a rather fortunate accident occurred. When the artist asked his sound engineer Ken Sands to play two alternate takes of the main vocals, the technician unwittingly played both tracks simultaneously. The unintended result was a duet between the singer and himself. Gaye liked this side-effect to such an extent that he not only decided to keep it, but even pushed this mistake to the extremes. Not content with mere duplication, the artist multiplied his voice several times on the final mix of the album. The harmonic, multilayered vocals became this record’s most recognizable feature.

By the time of the recording of his next solo album, Let’s Get it On (1973), Gaye had mastered this technique of overdubbing to perfection. In fact, he used it so frequently that his ‘old-school’ producer, Ed Townsend, even openly wondered if the singer was still capable of singing an entire song in one take. Nonetheless, it was precisely this extensive use of multitrack recording that turned his multilayered vocals into more than just a stylistic novelty. On this album, the singer capitalized on the immanent possibilities of the technical medium to play out the doubts, discussions and arguments that he had with himself. As a result, Let’s Get it On released the dissonant voices from the isolated existence in Marvin Gaye’s head and harmonized them on the multiple tracks of the recording.

Nevertheless, the album was more than just a therapeutic exercise of a troubled artist. In my opinion, the accidental duplication and intentional multiplication of Gaye’s voice are not harmless but have enormous philosophical, psychological and practical ramifications. Multitrack recording irreversibly cut the person Marvin Gaye up into a wide range of alter egos. The contradicting voices that were captured on Let’s Get it On can impossibly be reunited into a single, coherent one. They are autonomous personae rather than different aspects of a schizophrenic personality.

Multitrack technology accidently rendered the unified subject obsolete. The resulting effect of polyphony, however, has often been accused of being of mere esthetic interest. According to this line of criticism, the multiple voices of Marvin Gaye’s records and other works of art are purely fictitious, not part of any concrete discursive practices and can therefore impossibly initiate any social and cultural transformations. In this presentation, I will argue that it is exactly the other way around. Personae rather than individuals are the genuine subjects of discourse. Any person is part of multiple, diverse practices and is therefore incapable of fully identifying with the role that any particular one of them forces on him. Correspondingly, I suggest a re-conceptualization of the post-human subject as an arena in which the confrontation between different roles takes place. The new intellectual proposed here, is an example of such a battle field.

The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual

In his essay ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’ (1985) Cornel West vocalizes the unique predicament of the title’s protagonist:

“Caught between an insolent American society and insouciant black community, the Afro-American who takes seriously the life of the mind inhabits an isolated and insulated world.”

Although it is quite easy to misinterpret this quote as such, West actually refuses to define the subject of his dilemma in essentialist terms. The importance of the black intellectual neither consists in his skin complexion nor his ethnic lineage but in the ongoing tension between the contradictory roles that are imposed on him. Cornel West situates this specific individual in the struggle between the American society and the black community.

Instead of repeating the exact details of West’s analysis of the black intellectual’s predicament, I will here focus on the text’s implicit but crucial, theoretical contribution to discourse analysis. ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’ subtly shows that a subject first emerges when an individual finds himself caught between at least two practices. As long as an analysis is limited to a single discourse, one can only speak of a subject position or a persona. Subjects, on the other hand, emerge in the confrontations between multiple practices; they are borderline figures by definition.

It is precisely such a clash of discourses that gives rise to West’s so-called dilemma of the black intellectual. The singularity of this situated individual consists in the fact that the white society and the black community both try to impose a particular role on him. In the specific case of West’s protagonist, the former practice pushes the intellectual to adapt to its “bourgeois model of academic legitimation and placement”, whereas the latter only seems to value his ‘life of the mind’ when it comes in the form of a performance or a sermon. Although West claims that the black community does not have an intellectual tradition in the academic sense, he nevertheless recognizes

“…two organic intellectual traditions in African-American life: the black Christian tradition of preaching and the black musical tradition of performance.”

West, however, neglects to further distuingish between these two intellectual traditions and treats them as identical. In my opinion, he thereby misses a chance to fully capitalize on the opportunities that his method offers, because he does not take the situatedness of his protagonist seriously enough.

West’s juxtaposition of two practices implies that in order to be acknowledged by both practices the aspiring intellectual has to play the role of The Scholar and The Performer at the same time. Both the white academy as well as the black community try to impose a specific set of norms, rules and expectations on the black intellectual. In other words, these discursive practices force him to act out contradictory roles. It is of crucial importance to notice that the black intellectual can never fully identify with neither The Scholar nor The Performer. What constitutes the protagonist of Cornell West’s dilemma is the struggle between two discursive practices rather than a fixed identity. Instead of lamenting the loss of a coherent subject, however, he values the transformative possibilities that this split personality offers.