Flawed Perfection

Marvin Gaye's "Here, My Dear" may not be the best album ever made, but it's my favorite, made all the more intriguing by it's unreliable narrator. It's like Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim" over a seductive groove.

It's a "barbaric yawp" of a song cycle, full of anger, pain, bitterness, paranoia, crippling regret and pledges of love spoken too late. There was nothing like it when it was released in 1978 and no one in the increasingly sanitized, auto-tuned world of R & B would have the balls to make it now.

The painful dissolution of Gaye's marriage to Anna Gordy (sister of legendary Motown founder Berry Gordy) is the albums obsessive subject. The profits from the record were her reward for enduring his wrath. The album didn't sell much and confused fans of Marvin's trilogy of masterpieces that preceded it: "What's Goin' On", "Let's Get it On", and "I Want You", a winning streak that changed rhythm and blues music forever. Although the album bubbles along in his signature slinky way, his fans didn't know what to make of it when out came lines like "If you really loved me with all of your heart, you wouldn't take a million dollars to part", sung in an almost anesthetized monotone.

But this record wasn't for them. It wasn't for anybody. In fact, it sounds like music that should never have been listened to, so vulnerable and confessional, like reading a teen-age girls heartbroken diary. What sets "Here, My Dear" apart from the other sensitive 70's singer/songwriters of the era is Gaye's willingness (perhaps inadvertant) to expose his demons, to allow himself to look bad. Does the man who wrote the lines "What I can't understand is if you love me how could you turn me in to the police", really seem like he's ready for a stable, trusting relationship? Could you imagine Jackson Browne writing those lines?

But it's not just the lyrics that set the album apart. In "Anna's Song", the record's definitive track, Gaye begins singing in a low mumble, sounding deadened, defeated. He starts to sing her name, once, twice and on the third time the music stops and he delivers the note. I have listened to this note, the second syllable of her name, perhaps more than any in recorded history and it still has a profound impact. His voice is so wracked with pain and anger that it's almost unlistenable, yet, as always, perfectly in tune. That one thrilling, dramatic note that he seems to hold for an eternity, foreshadows for me, the tragic descent into drugs and deep paranoia that was to come. I hear that note and it sounds to me like someone trying desperately to hang on to his life, to his gift and to his sanity. It's not even about Anna anymore. It's about holding on. And you can hear it in that moment. Holding on was something he was no longer able to do.