Marvin Gaye - Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)

Happy birthday to Marvin Gaye, who would have been seventy today. I try to avoid obvious choices when I pick songs, but today can be an exception, because this song is just. so. good. It's the final track on his landmark album What's Going On. (At the end is a coda that links back to the opening track. The single version understandably had that part trimmed, so that people are sometimes surprised when they hear it.)

To my mind, this song is one of those pieces of music that is nearly perfect. The amount of space in the arrangement, how often there is only one or a few instruments playing, is the first thing you notice. But it doesn't mean that it's simple -- there is a lot going on, from the busy bass part that is really the lead instrument, to the slow and dream-like strings that eventually come in. Falsetto vocals veering from unison into harmony, then at one point dropping into the normal range. Congas keeping such a strong rhythm that they make this slow sad song something danceable. A triangle every so often hitting an almost piercing note. And the words, about lives on the edge of despair, of thinking that there may be no reason to hope, of coming close to finally giving up for good. But...not yet. Not yet.