Berry Gordy told him not to release What's Going On. Too political. Too strange. A concept album about a Vietnam veteran coming home to a country on fire, framed as a single continuous suite with street noise and party chatter bleeding between tracks -- this was not what Motown did. Motown made hits. But Marvin Gaye had been making hits for a decade and he was tired of it. The duets with Tammi Terrell -- Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing -- had made him a star. Then Tammi collapsed in his arms onstage from a brain tumor. She died at 24. Marvin fell into a depression. He tried to join the NFL. He grew a beard. He stopped playing the game. And then his brother Frankie came back from Vietnam and told him what he'd seen.

What's Going On was released in May 1971, over Gordy's objections. It became Motown's best-selling album to that point. The title track, with its saxophone intro and its layered vocals and its heartbeat bassline, is three minutes and fifty-three seconds of a man asking questions that America still hasn't answered. Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) was the first major pop song about environmental collapse. Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) was a report from the ground, delivered in a falsetto that sounded like it was breaking under the weight of what it was describing. Marvin had gone from Motown's smoothest operator to its conscience, and he'd done it by refusing to pretend everything was fine.

What followed was Let's Get It On -- an album of pure, unapologetic carnality that proved the same man could be a revolutionary and a lover. Then I Want You, a suite of erotic devotion so lush it practically steamed. Then Here, My Dear, a double album about his divorce from Anna Gordy (Berry's sister) that was so legally transparent the judge almost blocked its release. The title track of Sexual Healing, his last great hit, was recorded in Belgium while he was in tax exile, a man who'd fled everything -- Motown, his marriage, the IRS -- and found sanctuary in a drum machine.

On April 1, 1984, one day before his 45th birthday, Marvin Gaye was shot dead by his own father. Marvin Gay Sr. had been a cross-dressing preacher who beat his son for years. The argument that night was over an insurance policy. Marvin intervened in a fight between his parents, and his father fired twice. The first shot hit him in the chest. The second, fired at point-blank range, killed him. The man who sang What's Going On was murdered by the man who raised him. The music is still asking the questions he never got answers to.