This 1971 record by Marvin Gaye has been adored by many, including my father, who raised me with these tracks playing in the background. He always said this was the greatest album ever made, and honestly, I couldn’t disagree. When I finally bought the vinyl myself in Ljubljana, in the cold winter of 2025, I hesitated far too long between Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye (how insane is that?). But the moment I carried Marvin’s What’s Going On into our home, my father’s eyes lit up in a way they never had with any other record I’d brought. For his generation, this album is a time capsule. For mine, it’s an inheritance.

And it’s only now, being older and better able to grasp its meaning, that I understand the weight inside these songs. Marvin doesn’t hide behind metaphor here — he names the violence, the despair, the poison. In “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” he is direct, almost blunt: skies turning grey, oceans sick with mercury, radiation scarring the earth. He said it as plainly in 1971 as if he were reading the news headlines of 2025.

When Marvin Gaye released What’s Going On in May of 1971, the United States, and the world were unraveling. This wasn’t Motown’s polished era of love songs anymore. Marvin’s own brother had returned from Vietnam hollowed out by what he had seen. Cities like Detroit, his home, were collapsing under poverty, unemployment, and racial unrest. The bright fire of the Civil Rights movement had been dimmed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, by state violence, and by the creeping sense that hope had slipped away. The world felt unstable, hostile, and uncertain.

And then there was the Earth itself. 1970 marked the very first Earth Day. For the first time, millions were speaking about polluted skies, poisoned rivers, oil spills, and industrial waste. Marvin heard this, absorbed it, and transformed it into something spiritual. “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” is not a protest song — it’s a lament, a hymn. He is mourning not only what humans had already done, but what he could already sense they would continue to do.

But What’s Going On was not welcomed by the industry that made him a star. Berry Gordy, Motown’s founder, hated it. He thought Marvin had lost his mind, calling the album “too political” and even “insane.” Gordy was convinced the record would be “the biggest fiasco that ever was.” For a label built on glossy romance and easy radio singles, this was blasphemy. Marvin’s response? A threat: “Put it out, or I’ll never record for you again.” It was defiance. It was survival. And Gordy had no choice but to fold.

The details matter here. Renaldo “Obie” Benson of the Four Tops had begun writing the title song after witnessing police beating protestors at an anti-war rally in Berkeley. He wanted to phrase it as a question: What’s going on? Marvin disagreed. He cut out the question mark. For him, it wasn’t a question anymore. It was a statement — not “what is happening?” but this is what is happening. It was final.

“For the first time,” Marvin said later, “I really felt like I had something to say.” And he said it — through grief, through resistance from his label, through the risk of career suicide. He said it anyway.

And now, over fifty years later, we are still listening to him, not as a relic, but as a prophet.

We keep telling ourselves these are “modern problems,” but Marvin was mourning them fifty years ago. The only thing that changed is the language. What was once ecology is now climate crisis. What was once smog is now airborne particulates. The disasters got bigger; the words got sharper. And still the cycle repeats.

Humans love to look backwards because the past feels safer in memory than in reality. We talk about Marvin’s era as if it were braver, freer, more alive, forgetting that it was also suffocating, divided, violent, and polluted. The nostalgia blinds us. And maybe that’s human nature: to polish memory so we don’t have to confront the raw truth of repetition.

Here’s the thing, even now, we hear about climate change as if it only affects polar bears on melting ice or islands sinking far from us. We treat it as a distant tragedy, someone else’s crisis, never our own. And yet, like Marvin said, “things ain’t what they used to be.” The smog is still here, the seas are still rising, and empathy, even at its best, has limits. We care only until survival distracts us again.

The cruelest part: the very systems we live in force us to keep our gaze narrow. Work, consume, survive. The second you look away, you risk your place in the machine. Marvin called it out in 1971. We still call it out in 2025. But calling it out isn’t the same as changing it.

And maybe that’s the tragedy — and the choice. In every generation, there are those who sing the warning and those who try to silence it. Marvin risked his career, his reputation, even his relationship with Motown to say something real. Berry Gordy tried to suppress it, terrified that the truth would ruin the machine he built.

Fifty years later, that choice hasn’t disappeared. Today, you can either be a Gaye or a Gordy. You can risk being dismissed as radical, too political, “insane,” for speaking the truth about our poisoned world. Or you can protect the system, polish the surface, and call the warnings too dangerous to release.

The irony is that Marvin’s voice still echoes, still asks us what’s going on? And the answer is: the same as before, only louder. The question now is — who will we be?

Dorotea Grkovikj