To Walk Upright Nonetheless

The year is 1970. In the USA, raw violence reigns chronically in the streets. The police move with maximum brutality against anyone who speaks out publicly against the Vietnam War.

Mass demonstrations are broken up with mounted police, batons and plenty of lead. The state press tramples the peace movement wholesale into the dust. Whoever critically examines a politics of confrontation, whoever recognizes and names the arms industry as the driver of the war, is branded a communist, so that he may be thrown as fodder to the masses whipped up by the media as an enemy of the state.

Nevertheless, people who resisted the propaganda were the favorite target of the state and its press, infiltrated by the secret services. Back then the whole country resembled a cauldron whose lid kept leaping off the pot, because the political pressure was too high.

One of the reasons, alongside the Vietnam War, was the persistent racism against African Americans. Whoever spoke this fact aloud and found an audience among the masses lived dangerously and was silenced by the rifle.

Malcolm X was struck down as early as 1965. Three years later, Martin Luther King was murdered by bullets. Events such as these had deepened the social rift within the USA to an extreme degree. Black and white citizens were downright afraid of one another and thus served to preserve the power of the upper ten thousand.

Instead of reconciliation and enlightenment, that is to say „Heal and Rule,“ „Divide and Rule“ was brought to bear. This method of subversion was anything but original or unknown, and yet it worked — then as now.

Another similarity between then and now is the readiness of the so-called educated bourgeois to accept the zeitgeist dictated by the steered press and from then on to follow the orders from the very top. On all fours if need be: crawling instead of backbone.

Athletes or artists willing to risk their careers by saying aloud what they thought were extremely rare in the 1960s as well.

One of them had just cast off his „slave name.“ Overnight, Cassius Clay becomes Muhammad Ali. When Ali is due to be drafted to Vietnam, he refuses and prefers to breathe prison air for years. Ali’s reasoning summed it up: „I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me nigger.“

The world-class boxer had recognized that it would be absurd to fight abroad, that is in Vietnam, officially for those civil rights that were regularly and automatically denied to a Black American the moment he found himself within the borders of the USA. Whether in civilian clothes or in uniform.

Another candidate who was disgusted that the USA was prepared to deploy napalm and Agent Orange against the civilian population of Vietnam as well, in order to enforce its imperial aims while officially prattling on about the end of the war, was Marvin Gaye.

By the mid-1960s at the latest, Gaye was a superstar when it came to Black sentimental pop. His records sold like hamburgers with fries and Coke. On one condition: they had to give the Black audience the chance to escape, at least musically, from their everyday lives marked by racism.

Ever since Gaye released „I Heard It Through The Grapevine“ in 1966, he had dwelled on the pop Olympus. He was a role model of his generation. He had managed to bring himself to safety with money, into a bubble of affluent African Americans shielded from the arbitrary state.

„I Heard It Through The Grapevine“ is moreover the most successful record his label, Motown, had released to date. Marvin Gaye had developed into a cash cow. Everyone was high on this success. Yet for Marvin Gaye this success had long since lost its luster.

His girlfriend Tammi Terrell, with whom he had recorded various duets at Motown between 1967 and 1969, had succumbed to a brain operation in 1970. Gaye delivered the eulogy and had to break off again and again so as not to lose his composure.

The singer’s relationship with his father, a man of the church, was regarded as extremely tense, and Marvin’s brother was serving in Vietnam. He made no secret to his star brother of what the USA was doing to the Vietnamese people in this war and how his comrades at the front were being burned up. Their average age at the time was 19. By way of comparison: the GIs in the Second World War were on average 26 when they had to go to the front.

Marvin Gaye is not left cold by any of this. Unlike many of his Motown colleagues, he refuses to lay the long-overdue next heartache album on the desk of label boss Berry Gordy.

Gordy thereupon phones Mr. Gaye at ever shorter intervals, rages and threatens with lawyers and claims for damages. But Marvin Gaye would rather blast his brain into oblivion than deliver material he can no longer reconcile with his conscience.

Marvin Gaye turns to the Motown house band, the Funk Brothers, and without the knowledge of label boss Berry Gordy records the track „What’s Going On.“ The title says it all.

When Berry Gordy hears this song, its melancholy and the rousing political lyrics that go with it, he is appalled. How would the millions of fans react if their musical heartthrob suddenly sounded like the deeply sorrowful chief prosecutor of the American establishment?

The fans would turn away in horror, and Motown would let millions of dollars slip through its fingers — of that Gordy is convinced.

Gordy does not mince his words and therefore says of „What’s Going On“: „That is the worst record I have ever heard.“ For seven whole months he then hears nothing more from his „cash cow“ Marvin Gaye.

Then the as-yet-unreleased record reaches a radio DJ in Los Angeles. Three minutes and 50 seconds later, the world is no longer the same for Gaye. The radio listeners are utterly beside themselves. They are deeply moved and pleasantly surprised by their star’s message. They want more of it. Overnight, the track shoots to number 2 in the pop charts.

Cash and confrontation do not seem to be mutually exclusive, Gaye realizes. His boss Gordy thereupon relents and gives his star a free hand.

Marvin Gaye thus becomes the first Black American to record a concept album.

For the first time, too, he has complete artistic freedom, and he thanks the label’s house band for it by explicitly mentioning the Funk Brothers in the credits — likewise a first at Motown.

The album „What’s Going On,“ with its nine tracks, is released on May 21, 1971, and contained one milestone after another. Among others, we find there „Right On,“ „What’s Happening Brother,“ „Save The Children,“ „God Is Love“ and „Inner City Blues.“

„What’s Going On“ is more than an extremely successful psychedelic pop album. It is a kind of sung and partly spoken appeal to the humanity in all of us, a profession of faith in God. It is less a piece of music history than a prayer of Gaye’s with himself and his creator — only that the tape machine was running in the background.

It is not about sex, tenderness, love and the easy life, as was otherwise usual with Marvin Gaye. On „What’s Going On“ it is exclusively about injustice, poverty and a life of hopelessness: the American nightmare.

Marvin Gaye sings of the brutality of war from the perspective of those affected by the Vietnam War: the flight into drugs in order to forget what has been survived.

The feelings of those who have to send their children off to war and lose them there.

„What’s Going On“ is a musical revolution not only for Marvin Gaye. The record subsequently influences an entire generation of war opponents and critics of capitalism. It becomes the soundtrack of all who feel themselves part of the peace movement or who regard the racism in the USA as shameful and vile.

The album is also more than a string of truthful and deeply sorrowful songs against bigotry, injustice, exploitation and war.

Corona critics are listening to this record today.

Thou shalt not lie, but neither shalt thou keep silent when others do so in thy name. When one recognizes how the entire environment begins to crawl, one should celebrate the upright walk and cry out loud: „Look here, here I stand!“ When the government sells war as having no alternative, one should stand up for peace as loudly as one can. Whoever wants peace must prepare for peace — not for war.

This 1971 album by Marvin Gaye is a record I have listened to countless times and which I integrate again and again into various of my playlists.

Every track helps me not to stray from the course. And the course is set not by the zeitgeist but by what is called truthfulness. Truthfulness orients itself toward the truth — and that is always concrete. One must not confuse the truth with the majority.

Marvin Gaye was not ahead of his time. In 1971 he was on a completely different plane, namely a spiritual one. It was not about overcoming a creative crisis. It was about the fundamental question of stance, of the sense and nonsense of life:

What is it all about for the human being on this planet? And who will answer him when he lies utterly isolated on the ground? Who is still there when no one is there anymore?

In times like these, „What’s Going On“ is more important than ever. Do not ask your doctor or pharmacist. Listen to Gaye’s work from the year 1971. No medication can do more for your immune system. The only side effect I was able to observe in myself was a settling serenity and the resolve to keep sailing hard but honestly on the wind of truth and never to lose sight of the goal.

In 1971, with „What’s Going On,“ Marvin Gaye discovered the inner sea route to God.