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Marvin Gaye — What's Going On
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Around 30 minutes of music:
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Online, there's no shortage of music from this album.
Some versions are great.
Some versions aren't (warning: link may cause drowsiness and nausea).
Here I've tried to keep as close as I can to the original. It's an edit, but it's kind of a playlist too. The idea was to choose highlights of the album and make a single piece of music with a flow from beginning to end.
Respect for a genuine genius means I've not changed anything unless I felt I needed to and, a brief intro aside, for the first eight minutes or so you'll not hear anything much different. From then on, the big changes that are worth pointing out are:
- At around 9:30, What's Going On (the track) mixes into What's Happening Brother. On the original vinyl album there's a fadeout between these two tracks, while all the rest of side 1 is seamless. There's famous stories about the fights between Marvin and Motown boss Berry Gordy over the record (whether it should be released at all, for one thing). Maybe this was one of the fights Marvin lost. Whatever the truth, the album was released with the hit single as track 1 side 1, fading out into silence so as not to confuse anyone. Seems to me though that seamless was the obvious original intention.
- I've made transitions either side of Right On — at the end of Flyin High (around 15 mins) and at the beginning of Mercy Mercy Me (around 24 mins).
- I've replaced the percussion on Right On. I never could stand that ratchet noise.
Enjoy.
The embedded player above plays an okay-sounding mp3 version.
You'll find a link to download a higher quality version here.
It's a .flac file, which means it uses Free Lossless Audio Compression, giving the best combination of quality and file size. If you have problems playing it (Apple being Apple, it won't work using iTunes) there's ways to fix that here.