Had I been anywhere near Washington, DC yesterday, I would have taken a ride on the Marvin Gaye Trail.
Would there have been a better way to celebrate his album, "What's Going On" on the 50th anniversary of its release?
The title song, and other tracks, were time capsules of the mood of the time--and among its most innovative works.
Those songs were written from the point of view of a Vietnam War veteran. It's hard not to think that he could have written it, almost verbatim, from the consciousness of someone returning from Iraq or Afghanistan.
So much was going on then, as now. The Summer of Love and Woodstock expressed hope that the world could change for the better; Marvin Gaye's song--as well as others released the same year (Think, of John Lennon's "Imagine," for example) said that things must change. They remind me, in a way, of W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939, in particular its penultimate stanza:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Interestingly, Marvin Gaye's album saw the light of day just as the North American Bike Boom was gathering steam. Although many people purchased bikes they rode once or twice, more than a few were motivated to buy and ride by the knowledge that an economy and society in which people drive cars everywhere and burn fossil fuels to do everything else was not sustainable: The inevitable results would be environmental degradation (Now we know environmental destruction is an all-too-real possiblity!), inequality and all manner of other injustices--and war.
What's going on now? What would Marvin Gaye make of it? Would he take a ride on the trail named for him?
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| I always suspected that Marvin was one of us! |
