Gaye won that battle. And in winning it, he changed what was possible for artists within the Motown system and, more broadly, within the mainstream commercial music industry.
The artists who came after him—not just at Motown, but throughout the industry—inherited a world in which it was somewhat more accepted that a commercially successful artist might also be a serious artist with something to say. Gaye didn’t create that possibility single-handedly. But he pushed the door open farther than it had been.
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THE MEANING OF “HERE, MY DEAR”
There is no album in Marvin Gaye’s catalog that has been more thoroughly reassessed in the years since his death than *Here, My Dear*.
On its release in December 1978, it was largely dismissed. It was peculiar. It was a double album—an expensive commercial proposition in an era when record companies were beginning to worry about the economics of disco’s decline. It was not what anyone expected from the man who had made “Got to Give It Up” and “Let’s Get It On.”
It was also, in retrospect, completely unprecedented.
What Gaye had done was make an album that was simultaneously a commercial product—a record designed to satisfy the divorce settlement that required him to give Anna Gordy the royalties from his next album—and a completely personal artistic statement addressed directly to the woman who would receive those royalties.
He sang to her about their marriage. About love and jealousy and failure and the particular cruelty of two people who care for each other making each other miserable. He sang with extraordinary directness and extraordinary vulnerability, and he invited the listener into a domestic drama that most recording artists would have kept firmly private.