If you have any doubts that advertising can ruin a song, I offer as evidence the opening title track from Let's Get it On: a monumental paean to that place where sex meets spirit, a risky (for a popular artist at the time), frank celebration of flesh on flesh, that nobody under a certain age can hear without immediately being reminded of countless ads that use the song to sell everything from chocolate candy to dish soap to automobiles. (The implication, or encouragement, that consumers have sexual desire for those products is a topic for another time.) It's a shame, because the songwriting & playing are impeccable on their own terms. I particularly love Wilton Felder's nimble bass runs & Gaye's layered vocal harmonies. Next time you crank it, try to put away your associations of "the song from 1000 commercials."
It's also perhaps not intuitive for people who were born decades later to understand the throwback nature of "Let's Get it On." It works around a '50s blues shuffle, not a trendy style for the '70s & an example of Gaye flexing his newfound creative freedom to make music that Motown might not have preferred he release. Another song that feels out of its time is "Come Get to This," with doo-wop wordless backing vocals (multi-tracked by Gaye, again) that recall '60s pop as much as '70s soul.
Gaye's childhood abuse at the hands of his puritanical preacher father (who ended up murdering him) gave him hangups about sexuality that he only managed to overcome in adulthood by reconciling a new spirituality that didn't tell him the existence of his penis made him a bad boy. (He writes in the liner notes, "I don't believe in overly moralistic philosophies.") With this understanding, Let's Get it On takes on a new resonance: Gaye sings with the passion of a romantic lover, but also the passion of a man embracing a newfound serenity with a god who doesn't punish, reward, or judge.
The complex arrangements & progressive subject matter on What's Going On & Let's Get it On spelled the end of the Motown sound, especially as Gaye's colleague Stevie Wonder was exercising his newfound creative control at the same time. Similar to what happened with Nashville labels after Honky Tonk Heroes, Motown had to change their business model. Rather than a factory for interchangeable singles by faceless session musicians, they had to start taking cues from the visionary talents on their roster. It happened with rock a few years earlier, but for other genres the early '70s was when the power got put in the artists' hands, & we're all better off for it.
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