The 1924 song that proves the existence of God, according to Marvin Gaye
While you don’t necessarily need to be religious to appreciate how music can be a spiritually healing form of art, a large number of musicians who closely follow a faith are often compelled to liken both their own and others’ work to being blessed by a higher power.
Despite being someone who personally doesn’t follow any religion, I’m still able to see how God has entered the lives of some of my favourite artists and provided them with the inspiration to create some of their finest masterpieces, and it’s this ability to see the almost inexplicable aspects of life as being blessings from a divine entity that makes spirituality such a constantly fascinating area within music.
Perhaps the closest I’ve ever come to realising godliness in any piece of music is through the constantly evolving relationship I have with The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, a remarkable and pristine collection of songs from the mind of an individual who became at one with the music he was making. I may not have quite seen God while listening to it, unlike the claims that Brian Wilson made after his first dalliances with LSD, but there’s something undoubtedly heavenly about this work as far as I’m concerned.
Others will go further down the route of discussing their relationship with God in their lyrics, and this can also lead people to produce spellbindingly beautiful music that the artist often finds themselves crediting their deity as a contributor.
However, what’s a little less common is when someone asserts that someone else’s music must have been made by a god-like touch, and that they had a spiritual awakening as a result of hearing it, wanting the same thing to happen to them in the future.
Many people would argue that the music of Marvin Gaye, whether it’s his earlier pop-focused Motown chart-toppers or the more socially-conscious works that he began to release in the 1970s, were blessed in the same way by a holiness that made them untouchable by mere mortals. Gaye, on the other hand, believed that there was only one person in the world who was truly in cohorts with the heavenly father when composing his greatest works.
During a 1972 interview for Rolling Stone, while Gaye was still in the demoing stage of creating a follow-up to his seminal What’s Going On album, released the year before, he stated that he still has a strong emotional reaction to hearing the work of composer George Gershwin, and has his suspicions about the otherworldly origins of his magnum opus.
“I cry when I hear some of Gershwin,” he proclaimed, noting how ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ gets to him so much. “I know the guy really felt it when he wrote it. It wasn’t his hand that did it; it was God’s hand, and it was written for him, and I’m under the impression I’m gonna do something like that.”
Of course, stating that Gershwin was not responsible for writing such a divine piece of music himself is almost disrespectful to his brilliance, but at the same time, having that level of talent defies explanation, much like connecting with the spiritual world. For Gaye to have been touched by this enough to say that is not a mark of disrespect to Gershwin, but almost a case of him saying that he’s inferior to everything that Gershwin does, in the same way that he places himself beneath God.
