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“Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” closed the *What’s Going On* album and remains, in some ways, its most urgent track. It documented the specific experience of poverty and marginalization in Black urban America—the taxes, the bills, the sense of a system designed to defeat you—with a directness that distinguished it from more abstract protest music. It was not a protest about a distant war. It was a protest about the life being lived in the cities where most of Black America actually lived.
Gaye sang it with a controlled fury that never tipped into despair. The control was part of the point: here is a man who is angry and justified in his anger and not going to pretend otherwise, but who is also not broken. Who is still here. Who is still speaking.
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The cumulative achievement of this catalog—from the Motown singles of the early 1960s through the complex late masterworks—is the work of a man who took seriously the idea that popular music was capable of doing what literature and visual art had always been understood to do: illuminating human experience with enough precision and beauty that the illumination outlasted the moment of its making.
This is a difficult thing to accomplish. Most popular music, by its nature, is of its moment. It captures a feeling or a groove or a fashion and releases it into the world and becomes, within a few years, a period artifact. This is not a failure. It is simply the nature of the form.