Originally Posted by
Sotosound
A personal perspective.....
For me, Marvin’s greatest strengths are in what he did with material rather than as a songwriter per se. This is what brought him success in the 60s, and a lot of his better material from 1971 onwards also arose from collaborations.
In the end, I see What’s Going On as a true creative pinnacle and a personal favourite. It starts with a new musical idea and then follows that with a whole album of new material that’s arranged, produced and mixed in a new way. No filler from start to finish.
Trouble Man is also a favourite of mine. It’s not a conventional album by any means, but, again, it’s musically novel in some respects.
Let’s Get It On isn’t far behind WGO, and it’s an album that launched lots of musical imitators. It is, however, a bit of a hotchpotch, with every second of “Let’s Get It On” mercilessly wrung out to give us “Keep Getting’ It On”, and with a few older tracks pulled out of the can and finished. They’re great tracks, but they demonstrate that Marvin wasn’t really that prolific as a songwriter. This is in stark contrast with Stevie Wonder, who was creatively non-stop from 1971 onwards, and who just kept churning out great songs not only for himself but also for other artists.
I Want You is great, but it’s as much Leon Ware as Marvin Gaye, and it’s the amalgamation of those two visions that makes it what it is. Some of the lyrics are hard to make out, but that is, perhaps, part of its style and longer term appeal. The groove was king on this album. This is also the album where Marvin’s multi-layered harmonies hit a luscious creative peak. Again, however, it mercilessly wrings every second out the title track with a number of instrumental reprises. Whether this is an artistic decision or a commercial one, I’m not sure. We also get a pointless instrumental version of “After The Dance” as filler.
Hear My Dear is, to me, a cheaply produced one-sided semi-rant; plus it’s one half of a marital row being aired in public, which isn’t always a good thing. There are some good moments in it, but there’s also a lot of meandering over a few chord changes that doesn’t really catch my heart. The remixes on the 2CD Deluxe Edition improve things, but the paucity of classic material, the sparsity of the instrumentation, and the sparsity of those classic background harmonies are all still there to disappoint me.
In Our Lifetime has grown on me over the years. OK, it’s not full of WGO-level songs or production, but it does have an ensemble of great musicians playing some great music over some great grooves. There’s some true musical energy there and a nice, fresh and clean-sounding mix. For me, it’s an album that slowly insinuates itself across repeated plays, and it gets more plays from me in the 21st century than I might have originally expected on first listen back in 1980.
For me, Midnight Love has two really good tracks – “Sexual Healing” and “’Til Tomorrow”, and the first of these launched another raft of imitators. I always wished that he’d used more real musicians on this album, but that wasn’t to be.
A missed opportunity was the idea that gave rise to Vulnerable. This unfinished album shows what Marvin could do with material, including over-the-top and old-fashioned arrangements for a proposed late 60s album of ballads. Isn’t hindsight annoying and sad?
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