It begins with a sound that is almost not music at all: a murmur of voices, a party somewhere just out of sight, and then a saxophone, low and questioning, curling through the haze like smoke. And then Marvin Gaye sings, in a voice so gentle it barely seems to be asking anything at all: “Mother, mother, there’s too many of you crying.” When “What’s Going On” reached the radio in January 1971, nothing on the American charts sounded like it. It was not a love song, not a dance record, not a protest chant. It was a question, asked softly, by the smoothest voice in soul music, at a moment when America was shouting at itself. It became Marvin Gaye’s declaration of independence, the record that freed him from being Motown’s golden puppet and turned him into one of the great artists of the century. And it began not with Gaye at all, but with another singer watching police beat young people in a park in Berkeley, California.
To understand why the song mattered, you have to understand what Marvin Gaye was in 1970. He was, by any measure, a star. He had been Motown’s most versatile male voice for most of the 1960s, scoring hits with “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)” and “Ain’t That Peculiar,” and then, in 1968, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which became the biggest-selling Motown single to that point. His duets with Tammi Terrell — “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “You’re All I Need to Get By” — had made him one half of soul music’s most beloved partnership. But by the end of the decade, the shine had worn off for Gaye himself. Terrell had collapsed on stage beside him in 1967 and died in March 1970, after years of illness, a loss that devastated him. His younger brother Frankie was serving in Vietnam, and the letters Frankie sent home, describing what he saw there, haunted Gaye. He had begun to feel, as he later put it, like a puppet of the Motown machine: a handsome voice handed songs to sing, suits to wear, and moves to learn, with no say in what any of it meant. He was, he told Rolling Stone years later, re-evaluating his whole concept of what he wanted his music to say. He had even told friends he was thinking of quitting music altogether, perhaps to try professional football. What he needed was a song that said what he actually felt. Somebody else was about to hand him one.
That somebody was Renaldo “Obie” Benson, a member of the Four Tops, Motown’s other great male vocal group. On May 15, 1969, the Four Tops’ tour bus arrived in Berkeley, California, and Benson walked into People’s Park, where anti-war demonstrators were protesting, in an event that would become known as “Bloody Thursday.” He watched police beat young protesters who, as he later recalled, were not bothering anybody, and the sight lodged in him like a question he could not shake. “I saw this, and started wondering what was going on,” he said. “One question leads to another. Why are they sending kids so far away from their families overseas? Why are they attacking their own children in the streets?” Benson took those questions to his friend Al Cleveland, a Motown staff songwriter who had co-written “I Second That Emotion” for Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and together they shaped them into a song. But the song went nowhere at first. Benson’s fellow Four Tops turned it down, telling him it was a protest song that did not fit their clean-cut image. Joan Baez passed on it too. Benson later insisted it was not a protest song at all, but a love song, about love and understanding. He wanted, he said, to know what was going on.
Benson eventually brought the song to Gaye, and at first Gaye did not want it for himself either. He thought it would suit another Motown act, the Originals, a vocal group he had taken under his wing. Benson, however, had a better idea. He made Gaye an offer he could not refuse: sing it yourself, Benson said, and you can have a percentage of the tune; give it to anyone else and you get nothing. Gaye agreed, on one condition: a co-writer credit, so he could reshape the song in his own image. What he did with it was transformative. He rewrote the melody, added his own lyrics, and, as Benson later put it, added things that were “more ghetto, more natural,” turning a sketch into something that felt like a story rather than a song. He also made a small decision that said everything about his intent: the title would carry no question mark. “What’s Going On” was not a question waiting for an answer. It was a statement of bewilderment, a man looking at his country and simply saying what he saw.
When Gaye entered Hitsville U.S.A., Motown’s studio in a converted house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, on June 1, 1970, he broke nearly every rule of the Motown system. He produced the session himself, rather than working under one of the label’s staff producers. He built the track around the Funk Brothers, Motown’s peerless house band, but he let them play loose, jazzy, and unhurried, a world away from the tight, radio-ready Motown Sound. The record opens with Eli Fontaine’s alto saxophone, a melody so tender it sounds like a man thinking aloud, and underneath it Gaye layered something Motown had never allowed on a record before: the sound of a party. He invited friends into the studio, including Detroit Lions football players Mel Farr and Lem Barney, and recorded their chatter, their laughter, their greetings, as the backdrop to the song. The effect was deliberate and radical. The song’s mournful lyric floats over what sounds like a gathering of friends, as if to say that community itself is the answer to the questions being asked. Gaye also layered his own voice, singing lead and background parts himself, weaving his falsetto and tenor into a kind of conversation with himself. Lead and background vocals were overdubbed in July, and strings were added in September. In the middle of it all, he scatted, improvising wordless syllables in a jazz singer’s language, a moment of pure feeling where words ran out.
Then came the fight that nearly killed the record. Berry Gordy, Motown’s founder, was vacationing in the Bahamas when Gaye called to tell him about the protest songs he wanted to make. “Marvin, why do you want to ruin your career?” Gordy asked. When he finally heard the finished track, Gordy hated it. He called it, in the account that has passed into legend, “the worst thing I ever heard in my life.” He objected to the political lyrics, to the loose groove, and especially to the scatting in the middle, which he dismissed as “that Dizzy Gillespie stuff,” old-fashioned and uncommercial. He refused to release it. Gaye responded with the only weapon he had: he refused to record anything else. He went on strike, telling Motown that “What’s Going On” would come out or nothing would. For months, the label’s biggest male star and its founder were locked in a standoff, and the song sat on a shelf.
What broke the deadlock was a quiet conspiracy inside Motown itself. Harry Balk, the label’s head of A&R, and Barney Ales, its vice president of sales, believed in the record, and they decided to release it behind Gordy’s back. They had 100,000 copies pressed, with “God Is Love” on the B-side, and sent them to radio stations across the country. The response was immediate. Demand was so strong that another 100,000 copies were pressed at once, and all 200,000 sold within a week. Gordy, confronted with a hit he had tried to suppress, relented, and later admitted with characteristic frankness that he was extremely happy he had released it, because it was the biggest record of its time. The single, released on January 20, 1971, on Motown’s Tamla subsidiary, climbed to number one on Billboard’s Hot Soul Singles chart, where it stayed for five weeks, and to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, kept from the top only by Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World.” It also topped the Cash Box chart and sold more than two million copies, becoming Gaye’s second-most successful Motown song to that date. The puppet had cut his own strings, and the public had rewarded him for it.
Gordy’s surrender came with a condition: if Gaye wanted his freedom, he had to deliver a whole album, fast, by the end of March. Gaye did, and the album he made between March 17 and 30, 1971, in Detroit, with additional overdubs in Los Angeles on May 5, was something popular music had never seen from Motown. Released on May 21, 1971, What’s Going On was a unified song cycle of nine songs, most of them flowing into one another, telling a single story from the viewpoint of a Vietnam veteran returning home to a country he barely recognizes. It was the first album on which Gaye was credited as producer, and the first on which the Funk Brothers received an official credit. The title track led the way, followed by two more singles that each reached the Top 10 of the Hot 100 and the top of the soul chart: “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” and “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).” Gaye became the first male solo artist to place three Top 10 singles on the Hot 100 from a single album, and the first artist to place three singles at number one on the soul chart from one album. The album itself reached number six on the Billboard Top LPs chart, topped the Soul LPs chart for nine weeks, and stayed on the charts for more than a year, selling over two million copies by the end of 1972 and becoming, to that date, the best-selling album of Gaye’s career and of Motown’s history.
The honors that followed have only grown with time. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and chosen by the Library of Congress for the National Recording Registry in 2003. In 1985, writers at Britain’s NME voted it the best album of all time, and in 2020 and again in 2023, Rolling Stone named it the greatest album of all time, the first album ever to top that list in two successive revisions. The title song itself was ranked number four on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004 and 2010, and number six on the updated lists of 2021 and 2024; in 2025 the magazine placed it at number fifteen on its list of the 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time. A deluxe edition in 2001 added a full live concert recorded at Washington’s Kennedy Center on May 1, 1972, a reminder of how the song sounded when Gaye sang it to a room full of people who needed it. Gaye himself did not live to see most of these honors; his life ended tragically in 1984, after more hits, personal struggles, and a painful split from Motown. But the record he fought for has outlived every argument about it.
There is a reason the song still stops people in their tracks, and it is not only the beauty of the melody or the daring of the production. It is the way Gaye asked his question. He did not shout. He did not lecture. He did not point a finger. He sang like a man talking to his mother, to his brother, to his neighbors, wondering aloud why there was so much crying, so much war, so much brutality, and so little understanding. The song’s genius is that it treats protest as an act of love: the belief that a country worth criticizing is a country worth healing, and that the first step toward healing is simply to ask, gently and honestly, what is going on. Benson’s question, born on a violent afternoon in Berkeley, passed through Cleveland’s pen and Gaye’s voice and became something larger than any of them: a song that belongs to everyone who has ever looked at the news and felt the same bewilderment. More than fifty years later, the questions in it have not gone away, which is why the song has not either. It still sounds like a party and a prayer at the same time, like a man who refused to be a puppet and decided, instead, to be a witness.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the saxophone gives way to the voices. It is the sound of a singer who risked his whole career on a question, and who was answered, in the end, by millions of people asking it with him.