Marvin Gaye has the political ("What's Going On" or "Mercy, Mercy Me") and the sexual ("Let's Get It On" or "Sexual Healing"). If Sam Cooke invented soul, Marvin Gaye took it to another level. Sadly, like Cooke, he would die far too early (at age forty-four) from a gunshot after an altercation--in Gaye's case, it was his own father. But the legacy he left behind...one would be hard pressed to find any best of list over the last fifty years covering best artists or greatest singers or best songs or greatest albums where Gaye wasn't prominently featured. From his Motown roots to his work with Tammi Terrell, from his groundbreaking seventies albums to his eighties comeback, Gaye set a soul standard that has never been matched.
And the man had balls.
"Got to Give It Up," this week's featured tune, is basically Gaye's fuck you to Berry Gordy and Motown. Gordy wanted Gaye to record disco music when it was at its height, and Gaye disdained disco music. Gaye actually wrote "Got to Give It Up" as a parody of a disco scene--if disco had actually been as good as "Got to Give It Up" it wouldn't be sitting the in the moldy basement of mediocre music where it resides today. And this is the measure of his talent--what started as a joke, became a classic. Gaye sings in a falsetto of a man at a nightclub, a little too shy to dance, but eventually the music overtakes him and he's able to get on the dance floor and shake it until he meets a lady. Throughout there's talking in the background, a sense that you're actually at a club where the DJ is playing a song with a driving rhythm that everybody is swinging to, and the night is always just beginning. And if you aren't smiling while you're listening, you're just not trying.
The song is the only non-live song on Gaye's album Live at the London Palladium, and would spend one week at number one (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100.
And when the man sings "Keep on dancin'/Got to give it up" you know he knows what he's talking about.
Enjoy:
Peace,
emaycee
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