Marvin Gaye
Trouble Man
1972
There was a time - before the days of Zach Braff and his sleepy iTunes playlists - when movie soundtracks were worth buying. In the early '70s, at the height of the blaxploitation movement, three such soundtracks reigned above all others: Curtis Mayfield's Superfly, Isaac Hayes' Shaft, and Marvin Gaye's regrettably forgotten Trouble Man.
Recorded in 1972, directly after his magnum opus What's Going On, Trouble Man is a haunting, semi-autobiographical, blues-infused sketch of an album. Gaye composed and produced all the tracks himself, departing even further from his saccharine Motown image to create an ethereal soundscape of melancholy impressions - the lyrics are sparse, the instrumentation is muted, and the subject matter is, well, trouble.
Despite its ostensible purpose as the backing track to a B-movie, Trouble Man works because it offers an intensely introspective snapshot into the doomed singer's world-weary, drug-addled mind at the height of his troubled career.
