When I was growing up, I did not listen to the music of Motown until I was in high school. It simply was not what I was exposed to as a youngster, as most of the music that my parents listened to was rock & the singers/songwriters of the 1970s. However, once I did discover Motown, one of the singers that I was most drawn to was Marvin Gaye. Aside from his amazing voice, his songs really seemed to tell a story, or to speak to issues that were relevant to the time in which he was singing. For this reason, I regarded him as a person who was truly in touch with the reality of peoples’ situations, particularly those who were being oppressed or who were suffering from some sort of injustice.
That is why the comments that Gaye made in the 1978 interview published in Sepia magazine took me by surprise. When asked about the war between the sexes and the role of women in American society, Gaye struck me as being somewhat chauvinistic and condescending, making comments such as “the Queen cannot be the King” and “I know that if [men are] on our jobs, a woman can respect that and take her rightful place as a woman, if a man is really a man” (One Nation Under a Groove, 199). These are not comments that I would expect from someone who sang about the need for social justice and understanding of one another. After reading the article about the Black Arts Movement, however, I feel that I have a better comprehension of these comments and the context in which Gaye made them. According to David Lionel Smith, some of the literature that emerged from the BAM was characterized by “often asserting male primacy and advocating female submissiveness” (Black Arts Movement, 327). While I’m not sure at this time if Marvin Gaye is typically associated with this particular movement, it does help me to clarify his statements (although, I would not say that I agree with what he said, or think that he makes a logical argument!). Later on in the article, Smith mentions that despite this view of women, many talented and successful women did emerge from this movement and that their numbers increased significantly. It reminds me that the BAM was not occurring in isolation, but that other social movements were happening concurrently, particularly the second wave of women’s rights. When I teach about this time period in the classroom, I feel that I cannot underscore enough how much cultural, societal, and political change occurred in the 1960s and 70s, and this is just one example of how complex those decades were.
-Ashleigh Lalley
