(Tamla)
!!! A+ RECORDING !!!In the most widely heard and remembered live version of Marvin Gaye's classic "Distant Lover," he speaks over the introduction with the following monologue: "You know, when you're in... [heavy intake of breath] love... [painfully protracted pause]... and your lover
leaves you... [long pause, letting the agony fall over everybody]... And you've got
nobody, the lonely hours over here. Sittin' home and thinkin', you say..." and then a pregnant, wordless moment of sensual longing leading into the body of the song itself. The song is about something millions of other songs are about -- the uncomfortable number of miles separating the singer from his or her partner. But Gaye's anguished live preamble, the strangely haunting detail in the starkly soulful song itself, and his repetition of the phrase "distant lover" elsewhere on the corresponding album,
Let's Get It On, says a lot about this particular singer. He's not merely felt all this, as most of us have. He's thought about it -- a lot. Through and through, from every angle, almost disturbingly obsessive. He knows longing and shame. He knows
need. And he isn't afraid to tell us about it.
A less specific murkiness of sex and psychology -- half chipper cuckolding ("Ain't That Peculiar"; "Can I Get a Witness") and half blissful romance ("It Takes Two"; "How Sweet It Is") -- ran through Gaye's career prior to 1971 but with
What's Going On, his well-deserved and articulate hand-wringing about human nature took hold. It's still here in a significant undercurrent; "We're all sensitive people with so much to give," Gaye announces in the title track, and to be sure talking about fucking in such explicit terms was for whatever reason a political act in 1973 (even though the Dominoes were doing it twenty years earlier with "60 Minute Man"). But
Let's Get It On is a man trying to breathe finally after feeling the world tightening around him, and discovering that even in a utopia of consensual penetrative ecstasy, darkness exists just beyond the surface. And that's when his lover
isn't distant.
He has to be defensive; there are so many reasons to be protective of one's impulses. "There's nothing wrong with me loving you," he insists, and such rejection of the puritanical and the cold-hearted illogic of an angry world is both haunting in its tentative stroking and, of course, liberating. The title track, which features among other things the greatest reading of the words "I love you" ever heard on a pop record, is an unfettered act of defiance. It's not the most lyrically explicit song on an LP full of music designed for foreplay, but it is the most frankly joyful. Its sentiment is anything but simple (what about sex is, really?) but it has the basic humanism to provide us with a universal recognition of its thrust. And underneath it all, Gaye is railing against his father, the strict frowning overlord who abused him and forbade all expression of sin, hence his constant and eloquent, but somewhat troubling, spiritual defense of sex as an adult. There's nothing wrong, indeed. In large part as a result of the trauma of growing up with Marvin Gay, Sr., who in eleven years would murder him, Gaye spent some of his adulthood as an impotent man, haunted and troubled by the very things that he spends
Let's Get It On embracing. In addition to laying down an impossibly sexy record, he gives a nearly flawless psychological case study of a man aware of his hangups and tragic fears and attempting, valiantly, to move past them in a very public stage. It's here that Gaye's fearlessness, suggested throughout the '60s, comes to the surface; it's for this reason that
Let's Get It On manages to thoroughly eclipse its worthy predecessor.
The popular use of
Let's Get It On as a lovemaking soundtrack doesn't fail to give room for its harsher points. The palpable, choking sense of vague fear is in the text of "If I Should Die Tonight," and in a real sense its rebellion against such impulses is all the more triumphant by disregarding the dread in favor of its velvety vocal and lush evocation of So Many Nights. The vocal break on one of the "how many hearts" performances can underline either extreme.
Along with such emotional zigzags, it's useful to consider how little
Let's Get It On musically shares with Gaye's prior work. Smooth R&B was a young concept in 1973 and Gaye's work here likely vaulted it to a mainstream concern, but unlike many of the performers heavily influenced by this album, he edges closer to funk by integrating a sense of body-squashing rhythm and a pronounced, left-field doo wop influence akin to the Funkadelic records of the period. "Come Get to This" is miraculous, life-embracing, and of course a peak of the album's thematic strength and sonics, but it is most remarkable because it is simultaneously so backward looking and so singularly original. Gaye had clearly developed an understanding of how to craft an LP with completion and momentum: As on
What's Going On, the bed of sound allows even the more conventional or dubious ideas to work: the sumptuous closer "Just to Keep You Satisfied" is interesting precisely because it's at odds with the three more ribald bumpers on Side Two, and the direct title-track reprise "Keep Gettin' It On" might be the best sequel song in history, doing little with "Let's Get It On" except extending its fade and adding back in some of the vague political overtones of a previous draft. Gaye's biggest lesson from the funk bands might be brevity and minimalism -- barely half an hour with just eight songs,
Let's Get It On leaves your head spinning and wanting more.
The more you listen, though, the more the pain comes out. And more remarkably, the more the sensuality in even that pain is revealed. The second track, "Please Stay," is as far from "Let's Get It On" as can be imagined, a direct rebuttal to its uncomplicated, self-affirming bliss -- it is still sexy, but it's
desperate. All of the album's songs feel to some extent like a comment on the anxiety of separation (directly referring to Gaye's wife, Anna Gordy, sister of Berry); "Distant Lover" is the all-time treatise, a record as convincingly pained as James Brown's "Please, Please, Please."
Gaye's legacy for me will always be the lack of a filter that allowed him to play out these dramas in public. His best and strangest album, 1978's
Here, My Dear, is essentially a divorce proceeding set to music that finds him unflinchingly casting himself in a largely negative light. Even in the '60s, when he sang other people's songs, it seemed he found himself in every word, and he wanted to wring the most humiliating, telling personal details out of songs like "I Heard It Through the Grapevine"; how could anyone not hear his vocal on that magical single and believe he was laying himself bare?
But what I and so many others fail to credit Gaye with is the creation, really for the first time, of some conception of pop music designed for adults. And not to put too fine a point on it, but specifically for black adults. Not that Gaye's work isn't universal, not that
Let's Get It On isn't universal, but the audience to whom he is speaking seems to me a generation of people entering the working class, maybe young marrieds or maybe going dancing on the weekends, who might have some sense of what it's like to find love and/or sex and/or both in a complex, angry, often uncaring world. Even Stevie Wonder was never quite so direct, save perhaps on "Boogie On Reggae Woman." But race and class notwithstanding, the big-time sensuality here is not a teenybopper currency; it is the work of an identifiably mature adult writing for other mature adults. "You Sure Love to Ball" isn't meant to inspire shock or laughter; it's meant to be recognized as a celebration, as a clear-eyed and not at all juvenile evocation of how good it feels to fuck someone, talk dirty to them, take off your clothes and work up a sweat with them. Forget all the God metaphors writers attribute to this album. I don't in my heart of hearts believe Gaye would have wanted us to mistake this music for anything less than a placing of sex on a pedestal above all the stupid shit that can run counter to it. I believe that the generations of people who've gotten in the mood with this on are doing exactly what he wanted them to do, and I believe Gaye himself verifies this in the liner notes:
"I can't see anything wrong with sex between consenting anybodies. I think we make far too much of it. After all, one's genitals are just one important part of the magnificent human body ... I contend that SEX IS SEX and LOVE IS LOVE. When combined, they work well together, if two people are of about the same mind. But they are really two discrete needs and should be treated as such. Time and space will not permit me to expound further, especially in the area of the psyche. I don't believe in overly moralistic philosophies. Have your sex, it can be exciting, if you're lucky. I hope the music that I present here makes you lucky."
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SEE ALSO:]
What's Going On (1971)
