Marvin Gaye, one of the greatest soul singers who graced our undeserving ears, is going to be the subject of a new biopic directed by Julien Temple. Hardly surprising that someone would want to make a film about him with the life he had!
Professionally speaking, Marvin Gaye went from being a great pop star to a socially aware, right-on soul preacherman. From the glorious two-minuters of ‘It Takes Two’ and ‘Heard It Through The Grapevine’, to the far-reaching LPs of ‘What’s Going On’ and ‘Let’s Get It On’, Gaye covered a lot of ground.
However, away from the microphone and piano stool, Gaye had a soap opera of a life which belied the control he had musically. While ‘Inner City Blues’ confidently went about changing people’s perceptions of what black music could offer the world, Gaye couldn’t hope for a stable private life.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Celebrities That Care, where we get to show you a well-meaning all-star charity song gone horribly awry. This time, What’s Going On by Artists Against AIDS Worldwide.
In Marvin Gaye‘s voice, with the luxury of historical context behind him, What’s Going On was a landmark single – a sombre yet heartfelt plea for common sense in the midst of the Vietnam war. Strangely enough, when Bono cobbled together a gang of singers ranging from Britney Spears to the bloke out of Staind to do an all-star charity cover version, that message got a tiny bit muddled.
That’s partly because What’s Going On was already pretty good without Ja Rule popping up and rapping a little interlude, and partly because – since it was recorded right before 9/11 – its anti-AIDS message got cobbled together with an anti-terrorism message that neatly allowed Fred Durst to bellow “Somebody gotta tell me what’s going on/ We got human beings using humans for a bomb,” right near the end.
And that’s without mentioning the time the song was re-released for the Drop The Debt campaign that featured the line “I miss you B.I.G/ Let’s find a cure for A.I.D.S.”
Fortunately, this song cured AIDS, put a stop to global terrorism and single-handedly abolished poverty sometime after its release, so don’t we look stupid, eh?
