#5. "What's Going On" (Marvin Gaye)

It was 1970.  Marvin Gaye was on a self-imposed hiatus from recording following the death of his friend/singing partner Tammi Terrell, and apart from occasionally producing the vocal group The Originals, he didn't even want to set foot inside the studio.  
In the meantime, he was receiving letters from his little brother, Frankie, who was fighting in Vietnam.  In the correspondence, he'd tell Marvin about the unsettling things he was experiencing.
As Frankie Gaye told biographer David Ritz for the liner notes of The Best of Marvin Gaye anthology (1995), "The war sickened me.  It seemed useless, wrong, and unjust.  I relayed all this to Marvin."
Around the same time, Renaldo "Obie" Benson of The Four Tops had witnessed a crowd of young protestors get roughed up by cops in Berkeley, CA, where the group had just finished performing a show.  Benson told songwriter Al Cleveland about what he'd seen, and Cleveland started writing a new composition about social ills with the intent of having The Four Tops perform it.
But the other members of Benson's group shied away from doing a "protest song."  So while hanging out with Gaye during a round of golf, Benson and Cleveland decided to pitch him the song instead.  Gaye initially thought it might be a good vehicle for The Originals.  But after a lot of cajoling from Benson, Gaye ultimately decided to record and produce the single himself.
Along the way, Gaye added additional lyrics, pulling inspiration from his little brother's letters, and embellished the melody to fit his own style.  The result: one of the most soulful commentaries on the Vietnam era ever recorded.  In fact, it's less of a protest song (he's not really pointing fingers at anyone), and more of a rhetorical question to humanity: what are we doing to one another?
It's a favorite of mine because the message and the music come together so perfectly.  Its deeply funky groove perfectly captures the reality of the young soldier who comes home to his inner city neighborhood, looking for comfort, only to find unrest at every turn.  At the same time, the lush orchestration and the multi-tracked vocals, which create a whole chorus of Marvins, almost border on the sacred.  It's simply one of the most moving, heartfelt pieces of popular music ever recorded.
Regarding Gaye's vocals, the whole idea of him harmonizing/duetting with himself came about as a happy accident.  As recording engineer Ken Sands notes in a July 2011 article in Sound on Sound online, they had recorded two, separate takes for the lead vocal, and Gaye wanted to listen and evaluate which one he thought was best.  Instead of outputting each take as a separate demo track, Sands just created a single stereo track, with Take #1 in one channel and Take #2 in the other, giving Gaye the ability to pan back and forth between speakers and/or listen to both takes simultaneously for easier comparison.  It was when everyone heard the playback with two Marvins sharing the lead that they realized they'd stumbled upon something magnificent.
Said Sands, "As it turned out, singing against himself worked, but I'm not going to take credit for thinking things through and saying, 'This is what I want to happen'...A lot of brilliance is bred of happenstance."