Marvin Gaye: What's Going on

The Hunt For New Music: New music is where you find it. Sometimes it’s a new version of something you’ve heard and loved from the past. Sometimes it’s totally new– out of your current listening universe (like Bachata, which we’ll get to later ). It’s the background song you can’t get out of your mind from a commercial; the backing track to the credits in a film; a song that holds your attention as you scan across the dial. In The Hunt For New Music, the goal is to bring your attention to music that you might not have heard before, or, if you have heard it, to re-acquaint you with it. Finding new songs is the first part of the hunt; the second is, sometimes, a bit more difficult. Not everything we turn up here at the Media Bunker is available for streaming. Sometimes, the best we can do is just point you to the song on iTunes or Spotify and hope that you make the commitment to click in and give it a listen. One of the best sources for new music we’ve found is SoundCloud. If you are already tuned into SoundCloud, you know what a great resource it is for music lovers and music makers. If not, check it out, because not only is some really great music available there for streaming or download and there are lots of new artist available to listen to. And–not an inconsiderate consideration–SoundCloud has a massively cool interface that lets us embed the music in the site so it’s just click to play. It’s a lovely piece of software engineering, really, and our hat’s off to the software engineers who put it together. Today, your attention is directed to a song you’ve no doubt heard before, “What’s Going On”, by the brilliant, gone-too-soon artist Marvin Gaye. Gaye was just reaching his full potential as an artist when he died at the hands of his own father, but the legacy of music he left behind reaches all the way back to “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” and “Hitchhike”  in the mid 1960s. The version featured here has been remixed by a group called The Relative Funk Sound System. They get it and they’ve got it going on. It’s a terrific remix, and a very worthy companion to Gaye’s original. It starts with an acapella solo by Marvin that beautifully sets up the mood and the music that follows. Like seasoned producers, the Relative Funk Sound System adds in the elements as Marvin goes deeper. A terrific rendering of a classic. Check it out here first, then on SoundCloud (register, it’s easy); RFSS (Relative Funk Sound System) kindly made it available for download so if they made the offer you should take them up on it. Dig in. It’s very, very good. And, yes, it’s not a coincidence that, with all the turmoil in the world right now, we picked this song to be featured in “The Hunt”.

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