Rerun Van Pelt for Christmas (it's from a Christmas special) and winter I probably used this before, but I don't remember anyway here we are, It's that time already.
I borrowed What's Going On from my RA/friend during my freshman year of college. I'd read about it and heard about it but never listened to it before then. To this day, it's been one of the more special times that I'd listened to an album. I was mainly a hip hop head at the time but listening to an album that so expertly and smoothly transitioned from opening song to closing song kind of blew my mind. It felt more like I was listening to an orchestral movement than an album, as I knew them, and I was in love with it.The site's been down for a minute, so it seems like it's appropriate to pick a new avatar. A bunch of great albums celebrate their anniversaries this year, and I decided to go with Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On, which turns 50.
Two years earlier, Gaye released What's Going On, possibly the greatest protest album of all time, a call for change and empathy to the Black community for the Black community, and the world at large, and he followed it up with the soundtrack for Trouble Man, which continued his introspective turn while adding funkier, more commercial influences, both of which are excellent. I do think the former is Marvin's masterpiece, but this is also quite good, going further into exploring funk while offering slower numbers that would kickstart the Quiet Storm subgenre of R&B. And of course, the title track is one of the all-time jams, part of what made his music a favorite when I was reluctant to expand very hard beyond heavy music as a teen.