Day 251: Marvin Gaye – Let’s Get It On

I needed some comfort today. I think I’m maybe coming down with a cold, or maybe I’m just a bit tired and run down, but nevertheless I did need something nice and chill today. Marvin Gaye’s soft dulcet tones seemed like just the ticket, so I thought I’d listen to his 1973 classic, Let’s Get It On.

Album cover courtesy of Tamla Records

Marvin Gaye, aka the Prince of Motown, was born in 1939 in Washington D.C to a church minister father and a mother who was a domestic worker. He started off singing in his father’s church, then moved on to singing in vocal groups, until going solo as a vocalist in the ‘60s. After he released his 1971 political concept album What’s Going On, which became a smash hit, he was in a bit of a writer’s block. He’d negotiated a new contract that made him the highest-paid Black artist, he’d recently gotten divorced and he was moving from Detroit to L.A. Amid this transitory period in his life, issues from his childhood also started rearing their head.

Having grown up in a conservative Christian home under a father who had very restrictive views on sex, coupled with horrific physical abuse, Marvin Gaye felt that his views on sex and sexuality were stunted. But he’d recently gotten a new girlfriend (who later became his wife) and he was ready to explore that part of his life, which led to his album, Let’s Get it On.

Let’s Get it On is an album of erotic soul-funk that’s centred around the theme of spiritual healing through sexuality, with sex as a source of joy and positivity, rather than something that’s inherently wrong or shameful. You can hear this in the titular track, singing “There's nothing wrong with me loving you, baby, no, no / And giving yourself to me can never be wrong / If the love is true”. He expands on this in the liner notes:

I don't believe in overly moralistic philosophies. Have your sex, it can be exciting, if you're lucky. I hope the music that I present here makes you lucky.

I can very much say that I listened to this in the wrong circumstances, as background tunes when playing computer games and nursing a cold. That’s about as far from sexy as I can get. But it’s still a very enjoyable album. There are very few people who have a voice as pleasant as Marvin Gaye, and the execution of the theme is bar none, given that sexy albums can age very poorly and eventually become more comical.

That being said, I didn’t get as much out of it as I had hoped, but I think that’s attributable to wrong setting and mood for it. It’s probably a 9 under the right circumstances, but without the right headspace I’m giving it an 8.5/10. Not tonight, Marvin, I have a headache.