Most protest songs make a statement. Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" asks a question. It opens with friends greeting each other at a party, then settles into a gentle groove while Gaye addresses his family one by one. He tells his mother that too many are crying. He tells his brother that too many are dying. He asks his father to stop the escalation. Then he asks the question that gives the song its name, and he asks to be talked to so that someone can finally see what is happening.
It is a lament dressed in velvet. The voice is warm and the strings are soft, but the words are the words of someone who cannot make sense of the world around him and wants an answer. Scripture has a whole book shaped like that question. It belongs to the prophet Habakkuk.
The Question at Berkeley
The song began with someone else's question. On May 15, 1969, the Four Tops' tour bus arrived in the Bay Area during the clash at Berkeley's People's Park, later remembered as "Bloody Thursday." The group's bass singer, Renaldo "Obie" Benson, saw police with clubs breaking up young protesters. Accounts differ on whether he watched in person or on television. Either way, he later recalled asking himself, "What is happening here?"
Benson sketched a song with lyricist Al Cleveland. The Four Tops turned it down as too political. Benson resisted that label. He said it was a love song about love and understanding. He brought it to Marvin Gaye, who reworked the melody and lyrics and recorded it in June 1970. Gaye had his own reasons to care. His brother Frankie had come home from Vietnam with stories of the war.
Gaye was in a dark season of his own. His duet partner Tammi Terrell had collapsed on stage in 1967 and died of a brain tumor in March 1970. He had withdrawn from live performance. He later said that with the world exploding around him, he could not keep singing love songs. When the album was finished, he gave the credit away. He said he was only the instrument and that all the inspiration came from God.
Motown founder Berry Gordy hated it. He reportedly called it "the worst thing I ever heard in my life" and refused to release it. Gaye answered by refusing to record anything else. After months of standoff, Motown executives released the single without Gordy's approval in January 1971. It became one of the fastest-selling records the label had ever had, and Gordy asked for a whole album like it.
A Prophet's Question
Habakkuk lived in Judah in the years before Babylon swept in. He looked at his own society and saw violence in the streets and justice that no longer worked. So he did what Gaye did. He asked what was going on, and he asked out loud.
"O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save! Why dost thou shew me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance? for spoiling and violence are before me: and there are that raise up strife and contention. Therefore the law is slacked, and judgment doth never go forth" (Habakkuk 1:2–4).
The complaint is not polite. The prophet accuses God of not listening. That is the deepest form of Benson's plea for understanding. It is one thing to feel that a society has stopped listening. It is another to wonder whether heaven has too.
And God's first answer makes things worse. He tells Habakkuk that He is raising up the Chaldeans, a nation more violent than Judah, to bring judgment (1:5–6). The prophet protests a second time. How can a holy God use the wicked to punish people more righteous than they are (1:13)? Scripture lets the question stand. It does not tidy up the prophet's confusion. It records it, word for word, as part of the Word of God.
The Watchtower
Habakkuk's next move is the turning point of his book. He stops arguing and starts waiting. "I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me" (Habakkuk 2:1).
God answers the one who waits. "Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time... though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come" (2:2–3). Then comes the sentence that runs through the rest of the Bible: "the just shall live by his faith" (2:4). Paul quotes it twice, and the writer of Hebrews quotes it again. The answer to "what's going on" is not an explanation. It is a promise and a way to live until the promise comes.
Gaye's title makes the same turn. He left the question mark off on purpose. As one commentator told NPR, the title reads as a statement, and the record goes on to offer answers. Habakkuk's book moves the same way. It opens with a complaint, and at the watchtower it becomes a vision written down and made plain. The question becomes testimony.
Gaye's album follows a remarkably similar path. The record that opens with the question does not stay there. Its songs move through war, addiction, poverty and a damaged earth. Then they turn toward God. "God Is Love" was recorded on the same day in June 1970 as "What's Going On" itself, according to one account. Later on the album comes "Wholy Holy," a quiet hymn calling people to come together under God. A critic described both songs as Gaye returning to his spiritual roots.
The title of that first answer is a verse of Scripture. "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love" (1 John 4:8). The question and the answer came out of the same sessions. Gaye went up the watchtower too.
"Father, Father"
In the song, the father is a figure of authority. Gaye pleads with him not to escalate, and many listeners hear the line as addressed to the generation running the war. But Gaye had a real father, and the words are hard to hear now without thinking of him.
The Reverend Marvin Gay Sr. was a minister in the House of God, a small, strict sect that blended Pentecostal worship with Hebrew observance. He was a harsh disciplinarian, and father and son clashed for most of Marvin's life. Even so, Marvin kept reaching for him. He dedicated "God Is Love" to his father.
The reconciliation never came. On April 1, 1984, the day before Marvin's 45th birthday, his father shot and killed him after an argument at the family home in Los Angeles.
Scripture speaks directly to that wound. "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up" (Psalm 27:10). Earthly fathers fail. Some fail catastrophically. Behind every father who will not hear stands the Father who does. The psalmist does not deny the abandonment. He names it, and then he names the One who takes him up.
Yet I Will Rejoice
The song's one firm answer is about love. Gaye sings that war is no answer and that only love can overcome hate. Paul said the same thing to believers living under Rome: "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:21). That is not a political program. It is a way of living in a world that has not yet been put right.
Habakkuk's book ends with that way of living. Nothing outward has changed. Babylon is still coming. The prophet trembles at what he knows is ahead. And then he sings:
Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. (Habakkuk 3:17–18)
The last chapter of Habakkuk is a song, with instructions for the chief musician. The prophet who began by asking what was going on ends by making music. He still does not know everything that is going on. He knows who is in charge of it.
That is where Gaye's question leads, if it is followed all the way up. The world will still be full of crying mothers and dying brothers. Some fathers will still refuse to hear. But the God who is love is listening. The just live by faith while they wait for the vision, and they can rejoice before it comes.