What’s Going On: The Song Motown’s Boss Tried to Bury

By Dan Cohen · Published 2026-06-27

What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye’s 1971 landmark, almost never came out. Motown founder Berry Gordy reportedly hated it — thought it too political, too uncommercial, a risk to the hit factory’s formula — and resisted releasing it. Gaye, who had built his fame on smooth romantic soul, dug in. He effectively refused to record anything else until Motown relented.

Soul with its eyes open

What he was fighting for was a different kind of song. Drawing on accounts of police violence at an anti-war protest and on his own brother’s return from Vietnam, Gaye made a record about the actual world of 1971 — war, poverty, injustice, ecological dread — sung not as a lecture but as a tender, searching question. It asked what was happening to a country, and it did so with compassion rather than rage.

The risk that changed the form

It was a massive hit, and it permanently expanded what soul and pop were allowed to be about. After What’s Going On, the idea that a love-song star couldn’t also be a moral voice simply collapsed. Gaye won the argument with his boss and, in the process, moved the whole genre forward.

What it measures like

On our scale it’s warm, smooth and mid-tempo — gentle and flowing on the surface, with all its urgency carried in the lyric and the mood rather than in volume. Full profile on its song page.

What’s Going On was released by Marvin Gaye in 1971. The account of Berry Gordy’s initial resistance and the song’s social inspirations reflects the widely reported history. No lyrics are reproduced.