Marvin Gaye was one of the most consistent and enigmatic of the Motown hitmakers, with a career that exemplified the maturation of black pop into a sophisticated form spanning social and sexual politics. Blessed with a mellifluous tenor and a four-octave vocal range, Gaye was among the most gifted composers and singers of his era.

Gaye started his recording career in the late 1950s as a member of the doo-wop group the Moonglows, though he left and moved to Detroit to sign to Motown in 1961. Gaye wanted to become a crooner in the vein of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, while Motown founder Berry Gordy pushed him to go in a more R&B direction. His first album, 1961’s The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye, had a mix of both styles and flopped.

In 1962, Gaye landed his first hit with the driving R&B of “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”; this started a string of uptempo singles like “Hitch Hike”, “Pride & Joy” and “Can I Get a Witness”. Slower tunes such as “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” positioned him as a handsome ladies' man. In the latter half of the 1960s, he released several successful singles with Smokey Robinson, including the top 10 hits “I’ll Be Doggone” and “Ain’t That Peculiar”, before uniting with producer Norman Whitfield.

In 1967, Gaye recorded the paranoid “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” with Whitfield, which Motown shelved. Whitfield rearranged the tune significantly for Gladys Knight & the Pips, whose version reached #2. Gaye’s version was released a year later and became the biggest hit of his career, staying at #1 for seven weeks and topping the UK charts.

Gaye also recorded a series of successful duets with female artists, including Mary Wells (“Once Upon a Time”, “What’s the Matter with You Baby”), Kim Weston (“It Takes Two”), and Diana Ross (Diana & Marvin). However, his late ‘60s partnership with Tammi Terrell was the most enduring and successful. Their first duet, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is the oldest song with one billion Spotify streams. Her premature death in 1970, aged 24 from a brain tumour, devastated Gaye and caused him to take a brief hiatus.

In 1971, Marvin Gaye marked a creative rebirth with the socially-conscious “What’s Going On”, which he produced and co-wrote. Gordy did not like the song, and Motown staff released the single behind his back. When the single became an unexpected hit, he gave Gaye a week to record the rest of the album. The resulting What’s Going On LP addresses social injustice, the environment, spirituality and drug use, and was a critical and commercial success. “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” and “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler” were Top 10 hits, and Rolling Stone named What’s Going On as the greatest album of all time in 2020.

After composing the soundtrack for the blaxploitation film Trouble Man, Gaye shifted from social to sexual with 1973’s Let’s Get It On. The title track became his second #1 hit, and much of the album was sparked by his infatuation with Janis Hunter, a girl he had met during recording sessions. The album’s closer, “Just to Keep You Satisfied”, described the end of his marriage with Anna Gordy Gaye. Let’s Get It On was his highest-charting album on the Billboard 200, peaking at #2.

Gaye’s intensifying relationship with Hunter inspired his 1976 album I Want You, which is perhaps his most explicit. Leon Ware had originally written most of the songs for himself, but was persuaded to let Gaye record them. In 1977, he recorded the one-off disco number “Got to Give It Up”, which became his third and final #1 single.

During this time, Gaye was facing significant legal trouble in his divorce from Anna, and agreed to give her half of his next album’s royalties as part of his divorce payment. In 1978, he released the double album Here, My Dear, which spoke about their divorce in extreme detail. The album was a critical and commercial failure at the time, but has received significant reappraisal in the decades since.

Gaye entered a personal slump, but started sessions for a more party-focused album called Love Man. Sessions were broken by his exile to Hawai'i, but upon his return, he shifted it to a more ambitious and self-exploratory work named In Our Lifetime?. However, an impatient band member took Gaye’s unfinished tapes to Motown, who remixed and released them in 1981. A furious Gaye responded by ending his 20-year contract with Motown and signing with CBS.

For his next album, Gaye moved to Ostend, Belgium to clean up his drug usage and focus on recording. While biographer David Ritz was visiting, he noticed several S&M drawing books on Gaye’s table and said, “You need some sexual healing.” This line inspired his 1982 comeback smash “Sexual Healing”, which won Gaye the only two Grammys he would receive in his lifetime. Its success made Midnight Love one of the best-selling albums of his career. Midnight Love introduced a more synthetic sound, making heavy use of the Roland TR-808 drum machine.

With this success, Gaye returned to the US to live with his parents and reportedly became extremely depressed and paranoid. His life ended tragically on April 1, 1984, one day before his 45th birthday, when he was shot to death by his father. Marvin intervened in an argument between his parents and hit his father, who then pulled out the gun Marvin had gifted him for Christmas.

Gaye remains one of the most beloved and influential artists in popular music, and has been referenced and sampled prominently in the decades since. Artists like Janet Jackson, Sade, Maxwell and D'Angelo have cited Gaye as a key musical influence.