His influence on subsequent artists is impossible to overstate. Prince—who may be his most obvious stylistic descendant—cited Gaye explicitly as a formative inspiration. D’Angelo’s landmark *Voodoo* (2000) was unthinkable without *What’s Going On* and *Let’s Get It On* as antecedents. Beyoncé has cited him. Maxwell has cited him. John Legend has cited him.
In 2019, Motown released *You’re the Man*, the shelved 1972 album that Gaye recorded between *What’s Going On* and *Let’s Get It On*—and it made the top 20 of the Billboard 200, nearly fifty years after it was recorded.
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There is a particular way that Marvin Gaye’s death—the circumstances of it, the who and the how and the where—has come to function in American cultural memory.
It functions as a story about what fame cannot protect you from.
There is a certain fantasy about celebrity—the idea that success on a large enough scale provides a kind of insulation from the fundamental difficulties of human life. That enough money, enough adoration, enough artistic achievement can wall you off from the damage of your early years.
Marvin Gaye’s life—and death—is a sustained argument against this fantasy.
He had more than 60 million records sold. He had a Grammy. He had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He had a voice that could make presidents weep and lovers weep and strangers weep. He had everything that popular culture offers as evidence that a life has mattered.
And none of it was enough to undo what had been done to him in a house in Southwest D.C. when he was seven years old.