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“Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” from the *What’s Going On* album is one of the most prescient recordings in American popular music history. Released in 1971—at a moment when environmentalism was just beginning to enter mainstream American political consciousness—the song catalogued what was being lost: oil wasted on the ocean, radiation underground, fish full of mercury, animals losing their homes.
These were not abstract concerns. They were specific, documented facts rendered in the most emotionally accessible form Gaye could devise. He was making an argument, but he was making it the way only music can: by making you feel the truth of it before you’ve had time to debate it.
More than fifty years later, the concerns the song identified have not been resolved. The world described in “Mercy Mercy Me” is still recognizably the world we live in. The song has become, over time, more accurate rather than less.
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“Got to Give It Up” (1977) came from a place Gaye himself found surprising: he was reportedly uncomfortable at large social gatherings, and the song emerged from his experience of standing nervously on the edge of a party, watching other people dance. He converted his social anxiety into a record that made people dance. It went to No. 1 simultaneously on the pop, R&B, and dance charts—a rare trifecta. It is one of the most irresistibly pleasurable recordings in his catalog, and it is the song whose 2013 copyright case would become one of the most consequential legal proceedings in recent music history.