My first relationship was a two-year carousel ride of gaslighting, honeymooning, and coercion. He was the first boy I’d ever held hands with. I was fifteen, and terrified of my body. Ever since I’d transferred schools in seventh grade, rumors were rampant that I was a lesbian. The gossip started because I’d never dated anyone, and it escalated when I didn’t emphatically deny it. Dating him, I thought, made sense.
Together, we crossed off a lot of my “firsts”: first slow dance, first kiss, first sexual assault. What had first seemed like simple love slowly mutated into an impenetrable bond. Even now, I lack concise language to accurately describe our eventual relationship, except to say that it was complicated. (I struggle even with the adjective “abusive,” but that’s another conversation for another time.)
I don’t remember exactly when I first heard Let’s Get It On, but I estimate it was after our breakup, sometime in my late teens. In retrospect, the album seems to have melted into those adolescent memories, superimposing its rhythms onto my experiences. I do remember feeling an immediate comfort in the music. It was sexual, yes, but there was no threat in the songs. Instead, he sang about respect and spirituality. He sang about making peace with the fact of a human body.
I would later learn of the indescribable, lifelong abuse that Gaye endured from his father. I would learn about the violence that Gaye inflicted upon his second wife, Janis, who inspired him to write “If I Should Die Tonight.” I would learn how, one day before his forty-fifth birthday, Gaye’s father shot and killed him. I would learn how Gaye’s sister, Jeanne, contended that Gaye had wanted to die, that he “knew just what he was doing” when he picked a fight with his father. I would begin to question those easy ideas of physical harmony.
As with most narratives, my understanding of his grew simpler before it grew complicated.
When I listen to Let’s Get It On today, I listen through the filter of these stories. I hear radical respect, bodily autonomy; obsessive control. I hear these notions rubbing up against one another, sharing space despite their contradictions.
As a young adult, I’m beginning to comprehend just how tangled his music is, how a lyric like “I would never die blue / ‘cause I’ve known you” is both captivatingly tender and unsettlingly domineering. I think of the feelings in a first kiss, when your stomach is filled with the rush of optimism. I give myself a moment to sit with this, and then I think of the feelings that come later, when you’re constantly glancing back, hoping he’s not following you.
- "If I Should Die Tonight" from Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On (1973)
