Ben Edmonds.
Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On and the Last Days of the Motown Sound.
2003.

This a beautiful and, in a way, ideal rock text. It tries to focus on the magnificent 35 minutes of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, but this effort at focus is really an anchor for digressions in all directions about Detroit, Motown, Berry Gordy, Marvin Gaye, and any number of musicians, composers, songwriters, arrangers and performers from the Motown assembly line. The book’s production is lovingly typeset, and written with a jazzy and passionate mastery of its subject matter that allows for endless learned and worthwhile asides and digressions such that its motion happens in a spiral of whirling orbits around the nucleus of Marvin Gaye circa 1971.