Marvin Gaye Told Prince He Was the Only One Who Understood Music — Prince Never Forgot It D

It was the late 1970s, and a teenager from Minneapolis was sitting in a room listening to a record that was changing the way he understood what music could do. He was 17, 18 years old. He had been playing instruments since he was seven, piano first, then guitar, then drums, then everything else he could get his hands on.

Absorbing each one with the obsessive completeness of someone for whom music was not a hobby or an ambition, but a necessity. The primary means by which he made sense of the world and his place in it. He had grown up in a house where music was always present and always complicated. A father who was a jazz musician, a mother who sang, a childhood that was difficult in ways that music helped him survive.

And that eventually became the raw material for the songs he would spend his life making. His name was Prince Rogers Nelson. The world would come to know him simply as Prince, and the record he was listening to in that room in Minneapolis, the record that had reached inside him and rearranged something there in a way that nothing had done before, was What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye.

He had heard soul music before. He had heard R&B, heard funk, heard the full spectrum of black American music. That was the inheritance of any young musician growing up in the 1970s. He had heard Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder and the artists who had defined the previous decade and were still defining the current one.

But What’s Going On was different. What Is Going On was not just music. It was an argument. It was a position. It was a man standing in front of the world and saying, “This is what is happening. This is what it costs. This is what we owe each other. This is what love looks like when you take it seriously enough to ask the hard questions.

” Prince heard all of it and he understood with the specific clarity that comes to artists when they encounter the work that defines what they are trying to do that this was the thing, that whatever music was for whatever it was supposed to accomplish beyond entertainment beyond commerce beyond the simple fact of sound filling a room Marvin Gaye had understood it and put it on a record and sent it out into the world.

He needed to meet him. The meeting happened in the early 1980s when Prince had already released his first few albums and was beginning to be recognized as something genuinely new in popular music not just talented, not just skilled but operating at a level of creative ambition that most of his contemporaries could not quite reach.

He had developed in a remarkably short time a musical vocabulary that was entirely his own a synthesis of everything he had absorbed. The gospel, the funk the rock the soul the Minneapolis sound that he was in the process of inventing into something that had no obvious precedent and no easy category, but he was still finding his way toward what he wanted to say.

He had the technique. He had the vision. What he was still working out was the purpose not in the commercial sense, not what the music was going to sell or who it was going to reach. But in the deeper sense of what he believed music was actually for what its responsibility was what it owed the people who heard it.

Marvin Gaye had an answer to that question and Prince who had arrived at many of his own answers by listening to Marvin’s records in rooms in Minneapolis wanted to hear it from the source. The details of their meetings and there were multiple meetings multiple conversations over the years that followed have been described by people who were present, by Prince himself in interviews, and by people close to Marvin who have spoken about what the relationship meant to both of them. What emerges from those accounts is a portrait of two men who recognized in each other something that was rare enough to require acknowledgement. Marvin saw in Prince what very few people had yet seen clearly. Not just a gifted performer, not just an unusually skilled musician, but an artist of genuine philosophical seriousness who was using popular music the way that serious artists in other mediums used their work as a means of investigation, as a way of

asking questions that did not have easy answers, as a vehicle for honesty that went deeper than the conventions of the genre usually required or rewarded. He told Prince something in one of those early conversations that Prince would quote for the rest of his life. That appears in interviews and in the accounts of people who knew him.

That clearly landed with the force of recognition rather than the force of new information. He told Prince that he was the only one who understood what music was really for. Not the only talented musician, not the only innovative artist, the only one among the musicians of his generation, among the people Prince was watching and studying and measuring himself against, who seemed to understand that music was not decoration, that it was not entertainment in the trivial sense of something that fills time pleasantly, that it was a form of truth telling, a technology for saying things that could not be said any other way, a responsibility as much as a gift. Prince heard this and never forgot it. To understand why those words landed so heavily, why they became a touchstone that Prince returned to his career. You need to understand what Marvin Gaye’s own relationship with that belief

had cost him. Marvin Gaye had not arrived at his understanding of what music was for easily or without consequence. He had arrived at it through a decade of fighting Berry Gordy and the Motown machine, through 2 years of silence and withdrawal, through the battle over What’s Going On that had put his entire career at risk in service of a record that the industry told him nobody wanted and the world told him otherwise.

He had paid for the belief that music was more than commerce with genuine professional risk, with relationships damaged, with years of difficulty that a more pragmatic artist would have avoided by simply giving the machine what it needed. He knew what it cost to believe that music was for something. He knew because he had paid the cost, and when he looked at Prince and saw the same belief, the same refusal to treat musical gift as a merely commercial proposition, the same insistence on using the platform that popular music provided to say things that mattered, he recognized a kindred spirit in the specific, rare sense of someone who is going to face the same battles and needed to know that the battles were worth fighting. The conversations between Marvin Gaye and Prince were not, by all accounts, the kind of formal mentorship that the word implies. They were more like a dialogue between equals who happen to be at different

points in the same journey. Marvin was 40, 41, 42, a man who had already made his most important work, who had survived the battles and paid the costs, and was in the complicated late period of a life and career that had been defined by its refusal to take the easy path. Prince was 22, 20, 3, 24, a a who had identified his destination and was still figuring out the route.

They talked about music in the way that musicians who have thought deeply about music talk. Not technically, not about production choices or chord progressions, but philosophically. About what it was supposed to do, about the relationship between the artist and the audience, and what each owed the other.

About the difference between making music that people wanted and making music that people needed. And whether those two things could ever fully coincide. Marvin had opinions about this that had been forged in real experience. He had made music that people wanted. The Motown hits, the smooth, polished, perfectly crafted pop records that had made him famous and made Berry Gordy rich.

He had also made music that people needed. What is going on, which nobody at the label wanted, and which turned out to be exactly what a generation needed to hear. He had learned, through the specific curriculum of his own career, that the two were not always the same thing. And that when they diverged, an artist had to make a choice.

He had made his choice. He was telling Prince to make his. Prince was already making it. By the time he released Purple Rain in 1984, the album and film that turned him from a critically respected artist into a global phenomenon. He had internalized everything that the conversations with Marvin had given him.

And everything that listening to Marvin’s records for a decade had given him. And had synthesized it into something entirely his own. Purple Rain was, among many other things, a record about what music was for. Not explicitly. Prince was never a didactic artist, never someone who stated his themes directly when he could embody them instead.

But the album’s emotional architecture was built on the same foundation that what is going on had established a decade earlier. The belief that popular music could carry the full weight of human experience without collapsing under it. That you could make a record that was simultaneously a commercial blockbuster and a genuine act of artistic seriousness.

That entertainment and truth were not mutually exclusive categories. The title track Purple Rain is one of the great pieces of popular music of the 20th century precisely because it does what Marvin Gaye had always done at his best. It finds the universal inside the specific, the eternal inside the immediate.

It sounds like a song about a particular relationship, a particular loss, a particular moment of surrender and acceptance. It is also, somehow, about all of those things simultaneously and about none of them exclusively.