To be inducted in the second year—in a class that included Aretha Franklin and alongside figures who were already understood as monuments of American popular music—was the Recording Academy’s way of establishing, definitively, where Marvin Gaye stood in the hierarchy of American music.
He stood near the top.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame star followed in 1990. These posthumous honors—the Hall of Fame, the star, the continued re-evaluation of his catalog in the decades since his death—represent a cultural consensus that formed in his absence and has only grown stronger over time.
The irony is not lost on those who have written about him: that Marvin Gaye spent his entire life seeking recognition and love from a father who withheld both, and that recognition and love poured toward him from the world at large in quantities that were essentially unlimited. He could not translate the world’s love into the specific form he needed. He could not use it to fill the specific absence his father had created.
This is perhaps the oldest story in the psychology of celebrity: the child who was not loved by the one who mattered most, who goes out into the world and becomes enormously successful at being loved by everyone else, and for whom it is never quite enough—because it is never quite from the right source.
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THE MUSIC AS TESTIMONY
There is a sense in which Marvin Gaye’s body of work constitutes the most complete self-portrait available to us.