CD Review: Midnight Love & the Sexual Healing Sessions - Marvin Gaye

April 1st, 2004 was the anniversary of Marvin Gaye's murder, an act that stilled one of popular music's most gifted talents and ended the story of soul music's greatest tragedy. Before his death he had made a spectacular comeback with Midnight Love, his final album and the centerpiece for his physical and mental decline. Its structure of exquisite singing, deliciously subtle sex ballads, and intricate reggae and new wave funk tracks suggested that Marvin had returned to the front of soul's vanguard. For a time he did, selling over five million copies worldwide, garnering rave reviews and putting himself, along with Prince, up as one of the premiere soul practitioners of the early '80s.

Its lyrical themes of spiritual cleansing, mental clarity, and great sex also suggested that, after years of struggling against drug abuse and a self-destructive streak that would give Stavrogin pause, Gaye was healing himself and heading for a positive ending to his life. But, as anyone with a faint knowledge of musical history knows, that wasn't the case. Marvin Gaye's death was one of the most haunting stories in modern pop's history; a frightening decline fueled by drugs, dementia and schizophrenia followed by his father shooting him, an act that, to this day, R&B really hasn't totally escaped from or forgotten.

As time passes and Marvin Gaye's legend grows into a space between myth and reality, Midnight Love stands as a mirror of his soul - fiery crosscurrents between genius and madness, manic creativity and manic depression, clarity, dementia, and sexual dysfunction, all held under a facaade of sweetness and positivity. What makes Midnight Love & the Sexual Healing Sessions all the more tragic was that it shows that there was a chance that it needn't have been that way.

By 1981 Gaye was a mess. Frail, mentally ill, and emaciated from a year-long crack binge, he was rescued and sent to Belgium by Freddy Couasert, a European promoter, restaurateur, and music fan. He had spent the past seven years snorting massive amounts of cocaine, building an eight million dollar debt, and alienating everyone around him. His records and singles at the time verged between too painful declarations of heartbreak and barely coherent funk numbers. Some of his records were among the best stuff ever done; some of his records were terrible. All of them had one thing in common; they sold miserably. So Marvin went to Belgium to get clean, resume his lifelong struggle to find himself, and figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

For a year he did get his life together and began to fiddle out ideas for a new album. The best thing about his 1981 clean period was that he got his eclectic musical ear back. In Trouble Man, Steven Turner's biography of Gaye, it says that while experimenting with basic chord structures, he was listening to a lot of Talking Heads, Bob Marley and John Lennon. The music on the tracks, on which Gaye played everything except the guitars and the horns, backs that up. In his eclectic chord changes and the melodic tension in his fender Rhodes you can hear as much Eno, Franz, and Byrne as you can hear Stevie Wonder; and Marvin's seemingly endless gift for off-beat layered rhythm patterns fit reggae's herky-jerky chord structure beautifully.

Article Author: Robert Lashley

Visit Robert Lashley's author page — Robert Lashley's Blog