Soul crooner BJ The Chicago Kid has today been announced to commemorate the 45th anniversary edition of Marvin Gaye’s timeless What’s Going On as a posthumous duet with the late singer. It follows the regular Top Dawg collaborator’s breakout sophomore album In My Mind, released earlier this year to widespread critical acclaim and boasting features from some of the elite names in hip-hop including Chance The Rapper, Kendrick Lamar and Big K.R.I.T. The record cemented him as one of the most versatile singers in the game.
As a fellow Motown Records artist, having his voice heard directly alongside perhaps the label’s most legendary and lauded singer is a huge honour. On his joy in collaborating with one of his idols, BJ said, “Marvin Gaye is a huge inspiration to me. The music he graced us with gave the world a little more beauty, and a lot more soul.”
The duet will be a part of the Motown: Reimagined series as an EP released on 10″ vinyl and featuring original mono versions of the title track as as well as God Is Love plus a coffeehouse remix of What’s Going On. Released in 1971, What’s Going On became Motown’s fastest selling single and the album itself spent a total of 53 weeks on the Billboard pop best-sellers charts. Politically-charged and socially-conscious, the song remains one of the best ever written and as relevant today as it was 45 years ago. It will be interesting to see what BJ will add to it but it will be sure to tug at every heartstring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Z-kjrSomw
Set to embark on a world tour beginning in June (although there are no stops in Australia as yet), this latest honour is just another hallmark in a career spanning over 15 years now.
Read our review of BJ The Chicago Kid’s In My Mind.
Image: Red Eye
Marvin Gaye‘s second wife, Janis Gaye, has written a memoir about the agony and ecstasy of life in love with the Motown prince and soul icon. After the Dance, My Life with Marvin Gaye is written with ghostwriter David Ritz, who helped pen Gaye’s massive hit, Sexual Healing. The book chronicles a relationship that lasted from 1973, when Jan met Gaye not long after her 17th birthday, until Gaye’s tragic death in 1984.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjlSiASsUIs]
What started as a passionate desire between the couple, grew increasingly harmful, as Janis portrays a highly manipulative and increasingly erratic man, who thrived on the emotional frailties he created in people. She writes of their initial mutual obsession, “The explosive power of our sexual union was incredible. We made love at every opportunity, night and day. We knew every inch of each other’s bodies. We never used birth control. It was clear that Marvin wanted me pregnant — and I did nothing to prevent that.”
However their charged relationship grew into something more dangerous when Jan realised Gaye’s level of possessiveness. Gaye asked to home school her so he wouldn’t be competing with “strapping young high-school football players looking to love on you“. Gaye’s conflicting insecurities also pushed him in the other direction though, as he sought to direct Jan towards other men, as well as couples. This culminated in a masochistic and drug-fuelled threesome between Jan and another couple as Gaye directed proceedings. In the days following this Gaye became convinced that Jan derived serious sexual gratification from the event. It’s the kind of conversation to get a relationship psychologist oh-what-a-feeling leaping with delight, yet highlights the troubled, even delusional, mind of a soul king.
“You loved it, didn’t you,”
“Not especially.”
“Oh, dear, please don’t deny it. You were an animal in heat. You couldn’t get enough. This was your dream come true.”
“Not my dream, Marvin. Yours.”
It apparently was not to be the only time that Gaye would push his wife into sexual encounters that he was not a part of. After pushing for so long, Gaye would become enraged with jealousy. Jan writes of one terrifying encounter where Gaye put a knife to her throat whilst on a mushroom and cocaine fed frenzy and begged her to ‘provoke’ him.
Jan eventually filed for divorce in 1982, two years before Gaye was shot to death in an altercation with his father, on April 1, 1984. Jan writes of her eventual forgiveness of herself for continuing through such an obsessive relationship:
“That I lost myself in someone else — someone as remarkable as Marvin Gaye — is no longer cause for self-condemnation.”