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Marvin Gaye What's Going On Meaning

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There are many songwriters out there that have impacted history for many decades. While exploring for a songwriter, I stumbled across Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”. Recalling back to the first time I listened to “What’s Going On” it left me in awe with the background sounds of an orchestra, its rhythmic soul vibe and the beautiful voices of Gaye, Mel Farr and Lem Barney is singing with passion. The song became one of my favorites, unfortunately, I never understood its true meaning. Today, I decided to listen to the album What’s Going On and did some research to discover the bigger picture hidden beneath the album’s layers. For simplicity, I will be talking about the first song in the album, “What’s Going On.” Al Cleveland wrote the song “What’s Going On” after his friend, Renaldo “Obie” Benson, talked to him about a protest he had witnessed. Benson wanted someone to produce the new song Cleveland had written. Benson showed the song to Gaye it by changing the melody and revised it to his liking. Finally, Gaye recorded the song as his own with the influence of Benson (Lynskey 156-157). This song talks about how we …show more content…

This stanza uses ‘we’re’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ to show that it’s not just the son being affected, but everyone involved with the protests and war. Line 25-26 confirms that the song refers to a protest with the son saying, “who are they to judge us/ Simply because our hair is long.” In 1971, the year this song came out, the Vietnam War was happening. With the war came protest that tried to convince the country to pull soldiers out of Vietnam. The majority of people protesting were hippies who wanted peace for all and considering they had long hair it could mean they are being referred to in this song. At the end of the stanza, lines 27-28 repeat the lines 5-6 and the verse comes back for the final

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