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FINAL NOTE
Marvin Pentz Gaye Jr.
April 2, 1939 – April 1, 1984.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted 1987.
Hollywood Walk of Fame star, 1990.
*What’s Going On*, named by Rolling Stone in 2020 as the greatest album ever made.
“Sexual Healing,” first Grammy wins in February 1983, at age 43.
Shot by his father.
One day before his birthday.
The music still playing.
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THE RECORDINGS THAT OUTLASTED EVERYTHING: AN EXPANDED ASSESSMENT
Let’s be specific about the catalog, because generalities don’t honor what he actually left behind.
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was recorded in 1967 but held by Motown for over a year before release. Berry Gordy initially did not want to put it out—he had already given the song to Gladys Knight and the Pips, whose version had charted, and he didn’t see the commercial logic in releasing another version. Gaye had recorded his version with a heavier, more ominous arrangement than the Pips’ take, and what emerged was something genuinely new: a record that used the conventions of the jealousy song to create something that sounded, in its combination of groove and dread, like a kind of existential emergency.
When it was finally released in October 1968, it went to No. 1 on the Hot 100 and stayed there for seven weeks. It became, at that point, the best-selling Motown single in the label’s history. In the United Kingdom, it topped the chart in 1969.
Its enduring ubiquity—it has been used in films, television programs, advertisements, and covered by hundreds of artists in the decades since—testifies to something that is difficult to fully articulate about why certain recordings survive while others fade. “Grapevine” sounds as immediate in 2024 as it did in 1968. The anxiety it creates has not dated.