Marvin Gaye - In Our Lifetime?
#15
By Tom Mott
January 15 1981
Marvin Gaye
In Our Lifetime?
Genre: R&B
Allen’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Tom’s Rating: 4 out of 5
Highlights
Life is for Learning
Far Cry
In Our Lifetime
I was assigned this album along with the Oak Ridge Boys' 1981 album. Reviews of an R&B album and a country album for a group dedicated to rock. There is a masterful essay on race and American popular music to be written there. Something about the multiple strands of rock, soul, country, and R&B. About American Bandstand vs Soul Train. About "Rocket 88" by Ike Turner being one of the contenders for first rock-and-roll record. About how a 14-year-old in Lompoc would hear "Elvira" but not "In Our Lifetime." About '80-81 being the birth of rap and early electro-funk. About the back-and-forth between artists like Kraftwerk, Africa Bambaataa, and Malcolm McClaren. About Prince listening to Gary Numan. About Bernie Worrell, founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic, all but joining the Talking Heads in 1980. About Walter Yetnikoff, president of CBS Records Group, supposedly threatening to remove all other CBS videos from MTV before the network agreed to air the video for “Billie Jean.”
This isn't that essay.
When I put this album on, I accidentally played the title track first. Fun "Got to Give It Up" party vibes. I realized it's actually the last track on the album, so I restarted and put on the actual first song. A delicious funky Curtis Mayfield vibe ... which then delivers some of the cheesiest rapping I've heard this side of Revenge of the Nerds ... before finding its groove again. Then, I read that the actual first track is supposed to be what's now the second track, "Praise." That one's a lovely slice of sunshine-disco a la Tavares "There Must Be an Angel" -- which in 1981 is a couple years behind the times. By Track 6, we're in deep, tripped out fragmented funk territory, as good as anything on Sly Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On."
What the hell. Who puts the song with single potential at the end of the album? And then starts the album with cringe-y rapping? And then follows that with disco bongos and a trumpet solo straight off The Love Boat? Then sings about the Devil's Music. Then disappears midway through into drugged-out, spaced-out jazz-funk?
Marvin Gaye does.
There's another essay too. The one about Marvin Gaye being not just an incredibly talented singer, but a songwriter. A musician who not only played drums, but percussion, piano, keyboards, synthesizers, glockenspiel, organ, and embraced the TR-808 drum machine. Who performed nearly every instrument on this album. Who struggled his entire career to reconcile the spiritual with the carnal. Who shelved an upbeat disco-album titled "Love Man" and recorded this one instead, only to have it hastily remixed and released without the question mark in the title by Motown before he could finish it.(1) Who's been called the "Prince of Motown."
This isn't that essay either.
I encountered Marvin Gaye backwards: A looping path through his career from 1982 to 1988. First there was Sexual Healing, (via MTV), then I Heard it Through the Grapevine (via the Big Chill Soundtrack), then back into his 60s Motown hits, What's Goin' On, Let's Get it On, (via K-Earth 101) and then finally his 11:53 disco monster Got to Give It Up (via the disco/funk revival of the late 80s and early 90s). Man, that's a groove that just keeps going and going. No wonder Robin Thicke and company ripped it off.
It seems odd looking back in 2020 that I wouldn't have known him more before Sexual Healing. My son can listen to Kendrick Lamar alongside Queen, and my daughter can listen to Harry Stiles alongside ABBA. But we didn't have endless radio formats back then, especially in Lompoc. We had Casey Kasem. And my brother's stereo, set permanently to Chicago. I wish I could pretend I was watching Soul Train throughout the 70s, but Soul Train mostly signified that cartoons were over for the day.
I have a memory of being at Round Table Pizza after a high school football game, feeding quarters into the jukebox and delightedly/subversively realizing the B-side to Sexual Healing was the instrumental version, and putting it on repeat. I refuse to Google whether it actually was the B-side. I prefer my memory.
I have memories of making out in the dorms freshman year to I Heard It Through the Grapevine. (The Big Chill Soundtrack was everywhere.)
I have memories of our best college parties -- the ones where we mixed Public Enemy and REM with ABBA and BTO and Got to Give it Up.
I have memories of an art grad student perplexed that we were all embracing the "cheesier" 70s music (Hues Corporation, Superfly) over the "classic" 70s music (Let's Get It On).
That's a winding way of saying that although the Marvin Gaye touchstone for a lot of music nerds in my generation is his concept album "What's Goin' On", my heart belongs to Sexual Healing and Got to Give It Up.
So I looked forward to this album with anticipation, because damn it's right between those two singles, so it would be filling in some blanks it hadn't occurred to me to fill in.
So ...
It's kind of a mess. But like Captain Beefheart, even his worst is better than many others' bests. And this is NOT "the worst." It's fragmentary broadcasts from another musical world.
There's a full, detailed Wikipedia article about this album that's worth reading.(2) Marvin Gaye struggling with debt, struggling with crippling drug addiction, struggling with the anguish of his failed marriage,(3) living in a bread van on a beach in Maui, begging his mother and his friends Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder for money. In his first suicide attempt since the late 1960s, Gaye, severely depressed, ingested a full ounce of cocaine, thinking he would die.(4)
Did you know Marvin Gaye tried to commit suicide in the late 60s? Me neither.
So ...
Did you know that Marvin Gaye sang backup vocals on early Chuck Berry hits?
Did you know he was a session drummer at Motown before he was a solo performer?
So ...
This album. It's good. Given the circumstances, it's better than it has a right to be, and not as good as it would have been. It's fun. It's dark. It's stretching. It's incomplete. It's disco and funk and soul and Blaxploitation and What's Still Goin' On and party vibes and soul-searching and pain and drugs.
And when I fear that I'm becoming increasing erratic -- late rent payments, unanswered texts, a botched freelance opportunity -- fuuuuuuuuuuck me if Marvin Gaye didn't spin a thousand times further off the track and still pull off this album. And then followed it up a year later with Sexual Healing. Solace.
"the artist pays the price/so you won't have to pay/if we would listen to what he has to say"
Marvin Gaye was an artist.
==================
(1) "Can you imagine saying to an artist, say Picasso, 'Okay Pablo, you've been fooling with this picture long enough. We'll take this unfinished canvas and add a leg here, an arm there. You might be the artist, but you're behind schedule, so we'll finish this painting for you. If you don't like the results, Pablo, baby, that's tough!' I was heartbroken." -- Marvin Gaye.
(2) "Entirely written, produced, arranged, and mixed by Gaye, In Our Lifetime? was a departure for Gaye from the disco stylings of his previous two studio efforts and was seen as one of the best albums of the singer's late-Motown period." - Wikipedia.
(3) "Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly." Jack Gilbert.
(4) "I'd given up. The problems were too big for me. I just wanted to be left alone and blow my brains on high-octane toot. It would be a slow but relatively pleasant death, certainly less messy than a gun." - Marvin Gaye
https://open.spotify.com/album/20DTTrVpPJwujuSmQJjU9E?si=j_z9W6yVRI29tB_mQPqJIA
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