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Rhonda Brazler
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By 1970, Black America was in turmoil. In April 1968, civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was brutally assassinated in Tennessee. Edwin Pratt was shot to death in the doorway of his Seattle home in January 1969. Black Panther revolutionary Fred Hampton was killed by police gunfire, while sleeping after being drugged, in Chicago in December 1969. In March 1970, Tammi Terrell, Marvin Gaye's longtime singing partner, succumbed to brain cancer.
For Gaye, this string of events became part of the recipe for a heartbreaking masterpiece to come: What's Going On, Gaye's 11th studio album, released May 21, 1971. Widely considered his magnum opus, regularly ranked as one of the best albums of all time, and inducted into the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame in 1998, What's Going On was born from both the singer's personal loss and the tragedy that descended on the Black community at the dawn of the 1970s, compounded by the thousands of young men returning home to America from the Vietnam War. Among them: Gaye's brother, Frankie. That same year, the singer broke a self-imposed three-year media blackout to talk about the tumult that went into the creation of the pivotal album.
"What's Going On," the album's flashpoint, came to be when songwriter and Four Tops member Obie Benson was inspired to start writing after witnessing Bloody Thursday at People's Park in Berkeley, California, while on tour in 1969.
"They had the Haight-Ashbury then, all the kids up there with the long hair and everything," he told MOJO (via American Songwriter). "The police was beating on the kids, but they wasn't bothering anybody. I saw this, and started wondering what was going on. 'What is happening here?' One question leads to another. 'Why are they sending kids so far away from their families overseas?' And so on."
Benson, who co-wrote the song with fellow Motown songwriter Al Cleveland and, later, Gaye himself, took "What's Going On" to the Four Tops and Joan Baez. After both artists turned down the tune, Benson and Cleveland shared the song with Gaye, who was adamant that the track was ideal to launch a new vocal group, the Originals. Benson ultimately made Gaye an offer he couldn't refuse: "I finally put it to him like this: 'I'll give you a percentage of the tune if you sing it, but if you do it on anybody else you can't have none of it.'"
"He definitely put the finishing touches on it," Benson said. "He added lyrics, and he added some spice to the melody. He added some things that were more ghetto, more natural, which made it seem more like a story than a song. He made it visual. He absorbed himself to the extent that when you heard the song you could see the people and feel the hurt and pain. We measured him for the suit, and he tailored it."
Example: The iconic saxophone melody at the start of the song happened while saxophonist Eli Fontaine was getting ready to play. Fontaine was just warming up; suddenly, Gaye stopped the tape player and thanked him for his work. When the instrumentalist informed the singer that he was simply goofing around, Gaye responded, "Well, you goof exquisitely." He had captured exactly what he needed.
Legendary record executive and Motown president Berry Gordy, on the other hand, hated "What's Going On," calling it, "the worst thing I ever heard in my life." According to Gordy himself, though, the truth isn't quite as dramatic. "I was in the Bahamas trying to relax," he remembered in the 2016 Motown documentary, Marvin, What's Going On? "He called and said, 'Look, I've got these songs.' When he told me they were protest songs, I said, 'Marvin, why do you want to ruin your career?'"
Released as the album's lead single in January 1971, "What's Going On" was an instant hit; it captured the country's mood while moving more than 10,000 copies in just the first week in record stores. The song made a steady ascension up the Billboard charts, peaking at No. 2 over the week of April 10, 1971. The song that blocked Marvin Gaye from the No. 1 spot? The Temptations' "Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)."
"There seemed to be nothing else to do," he admitted to Disc and Music Echo. "My life, destiny and fate weren't pointing in any direction, so I thought maybe that would bring it all together a little more."
Fifty years after the release of What's Going On, it's clear Gaye's risk paid off. Its impact has left an indelible mark on Black music and culture. "After What's Going On," Rolling Stone writes, "Black musicians at Motown and elsewhere felt a new freedom to push the musical and political boundaries of their art." Elsewhere, John Legend described the album as "the voice of Black America speaking out that we couldn't always smile on cue for you."
Even so, her creativity was booming. She wrote and recorded an entire album's worth of music alongside seven trusty collaborators, including Blue Bird producer Zach Golden and Samora Pinderhughes, who co-wrote a track on Blue Bird and produced Phoenix. Nearly four years later, that project finally gets to see the light of day: her debut album, fittingly titled Phoenix.
The 13-track LP started as a story of romance. But as Cephas Jones sat with the songs, she discovered her most fulfilling relationships were found in her family, friends, collaborations, and artwork, offering an entirely new meaning of connection and perseverance. As a result, Phoenix is a patchwork of her life, and every formative moment in her musical upbringing: It's her mother's love of Stevie Wonder's witty lyricism on "Bad Habits," her father's penchant for Prince's genre-bending production on "Fade in the Water," and her years of opera training on "Cali." As Cephas Jones puts it, it "just sounds like me."
Before Phoenix arrived on May 30, Jasmine Cephas Jones sat down with GRAMMY.com to discuss how she grew from the bluebird into the phoenix, and to revisit the moments throughout her career that cultivated into her first full-length studio album.
I wrote this album about three and a half years ago. I rented out an Airbnb, and seven of us worked on it. We made two studios in two different rooms. I remember telling everyone that I wanted a transformation in my sound.
My first EP, Blue Bird, was very melancholy. It has that blue color feeling to it. But with [Phoenix], I wanted it to have a lot of confidence. That was the only thing I said. The music could be love or breakup songs. We can write whatever it is that moves us, but it has to have some confidence in it.
Life happened. I went through a lot of really hard moments, and the album shifted. It became a metaphor for what was going on. For a long time, I didn't know how I was going to put out Phoenix since everything changed. I didn't know what the story would be, but in reality, it was all right there in front of me. I'm a person going through a difficult time and coming out stronger. Someone who has grown and learned.
I knew it was the album I've always wanted to make. And honestly, now, some of the songs hit harder or mean something else. It strikes a different chord, but that is what makes music so beautiful. If it's done in the right way, with emotion and passion, it's the type of album you can listen to, no matter what decade you're in. It'll still move you, make you dance, make you cry. I'm excited to perform it and have it out because it's going to be such a great release for me.
Kevin was a part of the writing camp that was there for seven days, and "Brighter" was one of my favorite songs off that album. I wanted to create a super funky beat. I got this rimshot that reminds me of some track on D'Angelo's Voodoo. It's got this kind of classic, in-the-pocket, fun moment to it. Musically, aesthetically, it was one of the songs that made my neck pop every time I would listen to it. I wanted to start the era with something that brought me so much joy.
Stylistically, the music video for "Brighter" is very similar to your other single, "Baby I Can't Give You Up." Is there a connection between those two songs? Are the women in those music videos the same character?
Listen, you can hear the songs and interpret them any way you want. That's what it's for. But in a music video, you see what it meant to me at that moment. Yes, it did start as a love song, but then it became a love letter to my family and friends.
I'm walking around London, which is where I was born. I'm half English, and a lot of my family lives there. I'm reminiscing through the hard times and who was there for me. Who poured me with so much love. At the end, there's a beautiful montage of my father, who passed away last year. Then, I hop on the train to my next journey.
I remember when I was 10, listening to Voodoo on my Walkman while I rode the school bus. People would be like, "What are you listening to?" It's D'Angelo. No one knew who that was because we were so young. I've always taken a different path when it comes to music. Again, it goes back to me trying to find my sound and what I like. That's really important to me.
That was the beautiful thing about that writing camp was because we were like, "Whatever comes out, just let it come out." If I like it, I like it. If I don't, I don't, and we can move on or try to work with it. But I'm not trying to put anyone into a box. It's one of my favorite ways to write. I don't know how I'll go back to a regular day of writing in the studio.
I recommend [any artist] to go somewhere, get up early in the morning, and write until like 2 or 3 a.m. Then, you do it again. It was so fulfilling to go back and forth between those two rooms. You're just leaning on each other. That journey to getting to where it is now was awesome.
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