Let's Get It On

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Let's Get It On album cover
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Total Tracks: 8   Total Length: 31:44

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Hua Hsu

eMusic Contributor

Hua Hsu edits the hip-hop section of URB Magazine and writes about music, culture and politics for Slate, the Village Voice, The Wire and various other magazine...more »

11.23.10
A celebration but also careful study of the contours of human sexuality
1998 | Label: Motown

After What's Going On and Trouble Man, Gaye suffered through a miserable spell of writer's block. Motown was changing, Berry Gordy having moved its headquarters from Detroit to Los Angeles, and Gaye was slowly beginning to feel the pressure that comes with an unprecedented kind of celebrity. As his marriage to Berry's sister Anna continued to implode in rather spectacular fashion, Gaye began scrutinizing the forces, from his abusive father to his newfound spirituality, which had shaped his relationship to desire, love, masculinity and duty.

Released in 1973, Let's Get it On was to the bedroom what What's Going On was to the world outside it. Like Gaye's provocative and nuanced landmark of social commentary, Gaye didn't intend for Let's Get it On to be taken literally, the lightly pornographic moan-a-thon "You Sure Love to Ball" notwithstanding. Rather, Let's Get it On was to be meditative and philosophical, a celebration but also careful study of the contours of human sexuality. "I contend that SEX IS SEX and LOVE IS LOVE," Gaye wrote in the album's original liner notes, and Let's Get it On can be seen as a sustained exploration of the possibility that these two forces might be aligned as… read more »

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From Pretty-Boy, To Sex Man!!!!!

isaacmusicman

Boy oh boy! When I heard the title song when I was kid, it made me blush in 4 different colors. Of course, by todays standards,"Let's Get It On" would be considered very tammed, but back then people were like ohhing and ahhing, but they also ate it up! It was one big come on after another, and it probably set the birth rate ahigh! My favorite though was "Please Stay (Once You Go Away)". Keith Sweat probably took notes from this begging joint. The only song that might have thrown the album off was, "Just To Keep You Satisfied." It was about his failing marriage to Ana Gaye. It's very good song, I just don't know if it fits here. Besides that, it's still worth the downloads!!!!!

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They Say All Music Guide

After brilliantly surveying the social, political, and spiritual landscape with What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye turned to more intimate matters with Let’s Get It On, a record unparalleled in its sheer sensuality and carnal energy. Always a sexually charged performer, Gaye’s passions reach their boiling point on tracks like the magnificent title hit (a number one smash) and “You Sure Love to Ball”; silky and shimmering, the music is seductive in the most literal sense, its fluid grooves so perfectly designed for romance as to border on parody. With each performance laced with innuendo, each lyric a come-on, and each rhythm throbbing with lust, perhaps no other record has ever achieved the kind of sheer erotic force of Let’s Get It On, and it remains the blueprint for all of the slow jams to follow decades later — much copied, but never imitated. – Jason Ankeny

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