What Marvin Gaye’s best work did—what *What’s Going On* and “Sexual Healing” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Mercy Mercy Me” continue to do—is refuse to become only of their moment. They were made at specific times, under specific pressures, from a specific life. And yet they continue to speak to people who were not alive when they were recorded, who have no direct connection to the circumstances that produced them.
This is what endurance looks like in music.
This is what he left behind.
—
The house on Gramercy Place still stands.
Forty years ago, on a Sunday morning in April, a man’s father walked into his bedroom and shot him twice. The man bled onto the floor of his bedroom in a house his own money had bought, in a neighborhood he had never wanted to return to, one day before he would have turned forty-five years old.
He had given the world “What’s Going On” and “Sexual Healing” and fifty years of music and he had never been able to give his father enough to make his father love him the way he needed to be loved.
This is the story.
It is not a story that resolves. It does not end with the wound healed or the rift repaired or the love finally received. It ends where it ends: with a gun, with a father, with a bedroom floor, with Frankie on his knees.
And then, beyond that, with the music.
Always with the music.
Still playing.