1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

 

500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper, which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time.

In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is:

1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life
2. Beatles, Abbey Road
3. Nirvana, Nevermind
4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours

And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits.

The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country that remains doggedly uneven and unfair.  Some of the musical motifs that will run through the record are introduced here - the smoothly crooning background vocals, the use of conga and bongo drums, the strings.  And of course Marvin's absolutely unassailable voice floating over the whole thing.  

The second one is "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," a song that I'm not sure I consciously knew was about the environment until this project, despite hearing it thousands of times.  I think I assumed it was about a breakup?

Woah-oh, oh mercy, mercy me
Oh, things ain't what they used to be, no no
Where did all the blue skies go?
Poison is the wind that blows from the North and South and East

I guess I never really focused on the later verses, where it's made pretty clear:

Radiation underground and in the sky (Please have mercy, ah, help us, Father)
Animals and birds who live nearby are dying (Oh, please help us, Father, Father, help us, Father)

This is a good place to note that this is an intensely Christian album; references to God and Jesus appear in a ton of the songs.  In "Mercy," it's pretty understated, but in a song like "Wholy Holy," it is not understated:

Jesus left a long time ago, said he would return (Believe in)
He left us a book to believe in
In it we've got a lot to learn
Oh yeah

The third song I really like on this album is "Right On," a distinctly Latin-tinged soul/R&B hybrid with an absolutely killer backbeat and some stellar flute work.  It was never released as a single; besides the title track and "Mercy," the other singles were "Inner City Blues" and "Save the Children."  The former is an extremely chill soul groove, while the latter is a half-spoken, half-sung dirge about how bad the kids are gonna have it.  He wasn't wrong.

Tom Breihan, a writer whose work I admire, and whose current Stereogum column The Number Ones is a must-read, wrote for Pitchfork in 2011 that What's Going On "is unquestionably one of the greatest soul albums of all time, an ambitious passion project that captured a master of the form at his absolute peak."  I think that's undoubtedly true.  Whether it's the greatest album in general of all time is a more personal call.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? No.

I have two more entries to make for this blog.  First, I want to talk about what artists and/or albums were overlooked, unjustly I think, by voters or whoever else compiled this list.  Second, I have my Top 20. 

Thanks again for reading.  This was fun.