marvin gaye - sad and interesting
Tuesday, June 8

taken from cnn.com:

His father, a Pentecostal preacher, beat him; an uncle sodomized him, according to the book; he had two messy marriages and lost his great singing partner (and romantic interest, according to Dyson's sources), Tammi Terrell, to a brain tumor; and he was forever torn between sex and God, a duality that emerged triumphantly in his music but sent the singer into a maelstrom of drug abuse.

He was a flawed genius.

"As the son of a preacher ... he was deeply imbued with the love ethic. ... Love God and love your neighbors," says Dyson, himself an ordained clergyman as well as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The socially conscious album "What's Going On," Dyson observes, "was as complete a sermon as you hear in church."

And yet, given his strict upbringing, Gaye was caught in a "sturm und drang ... singing the devil's music," Dyson says. "That tension -- that yearning and desire -- all that's attributable to the stormy passions [of his youth]."

... In the end, Gaye was killed by his father, shot by his own gun -- a weapon he'd given his father for safety -- the day before his 45th birthday. It is a death fit for a Greek tragedy.

yakob at 11:28 AM

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