"Let's Get It On" is a classic Motown single, endlessly repeatable and always enjoyable. It begins with three great wah-wah notes that herald the arrival of a vintage Fifties melody. But while the song centers around classically simple chord changes, the arrangement centers around a slightly eccentric rhythm pattern that deepens the song's power while covering it with a contemporary veneer. Above all, it has Marvin Gaye's best singing at its center, fine background
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voices on the side, and a long, moody fade-out that challenges you not to play the cut again.
For the rest of the LP, Gaye uses his voice (in both lead and background) to create a dreamlike quality only slightly less surreal than he did on What's Goin' On, his very best record to date. But while on the earlier work he sang of the difference between his vision of God's will and man's life, he is currently preoccupied with matters purely secular—love and sex.
And yet he continues to transmit that same degree of intensity, sending out near cosmic overtones while eloquently phrasing the sometimes simplistic lyrics. But then that should come as no surprise from the man who sang "She makes my day a little brighter/My load a little bit lighter/She's a wonderful one," in a way that made it difficult to remember whether he was singing about God or woman—and whether he felt there was any difference.
The first side was co-written and co-produced by veteran rock hand Ed Townshend, and it flows with ease, the melodies sometimes underdeveloped, but Gaye's voice, hovering around the falsetto, holding our attention and providing unique transitions in mood and style that happily bring us back to a reprise of the title cut, "Keep Gettin' It On."
Gaye produced the second side, and it is more daring and self-conscious. "You Sure Love to Ball" has the chant-like quality of most of the album but is overdone. What first induces a hypnotic response soon generates simple boredom, as his endless repetitions take on an unpleasantly obsessive quality. Conversely, the slow "Just to Keep You Satisfied" is too blatantly sincere. I prefer the loose sensuality of "Come Get to This," an up-beat song with a dazzling arrangement, devoid of the simplistic elements of some of the material.
Let's Get It On is as personal as What's Goin' On but lacks that album's series of high-points. Instead, it ebbs and flows, occasionally threatening to spend itself on an insufficiency of ideas, but always retrieved, just in time, by Gaye's performance. From first note to last, he keeps pushing and shoving, and if he sometimes takes one step back for every two ahead, he gets there just the same—and with style and spirit to spare.
By contrast, Diana And Marvin is a producer's showcase (there are four sets of them) with the singers serving as cogs in a wheel. The voices are well-matched, the material well-chosen ("Pledging My Love," "Don't Knock My Love
In a way, this is nothing more than the classy pop package it (and Ross) seems to be. But that is currently a rare commodity. Almost all of the competition is either in decline (Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwicke), a rut (Gladys Knight, Barbra Streisand) or both (Bette Midler). Because she recognizes her limitations and unfailingly presents herself with taste and control, Diana Ross is the greatest continuing force in the past decade of popular music.
As always, she takes some chances. Reading Charlie Chaplin's "Smile" as a mildly swinging jazz tune makes an interesting comment on both her budding acting career and her capacity for doing more than Top 40 belting. (Compared to Ross on "Smile," Maria Muldaur seems a truly rank amateur.) Her own production of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson's "Ain't Nothin' but a Maybe" proves she's comfortably in tune with the disco idiom, which hardly seemed likely.
The rest is straightforward. "Theme from Mahogany" is syrupy, but that may be deliberate. It sounds like old-fashioned movie music, which is an apt definition of the kind of star Diana Ross is. "I Thought It Took a Little Time (But Today I Fell in Love)" is the kind of song Hal David and Burt Bacharach used to deliver regularly to Warwicke. Ross devastates it, bringing to a lyric that is essentially a cliché both emotive power and true control. Her phrasing is simply remarkable, working out the tension between the sweetness of her voice and Gene Page's explosive, mnemonic arrangement. When she hits the chorus, other interpreters, particularly the litany of white amateurs so often praised by critics, simply fade away. Ronstadt, Muldaur, Raitt and the rest simply could not handle material simultaneously so mature and overtly sensual. Which only proves what is easy to forget between hits: Diana Ross is a popular music artist of the most regal kind. (RS 212)
DAVE MARSH
