In a carful of New York media men en route to a Catskills bachelor party the evening before neo-Nazis stormed Charlottesville, I declared Trouble Man the best Marvin Gaye record of the 1970s. This was a gaffe; I shouldn’t have said it. Michael was particularly incensed: “That’s just Marvin fucking around on a keyboard.” He wasn’t wrong, and by most standards mine was a contrarian take inspired by confused chronology (What’s Going On came out in 1971, not 1968), an overeagerness to impress new friends, and a nostalgia for the jukebox at Vaughan’s Lounge, my local haunt when I lived in the Bywater. I’d spend fistfuls of bar change on the title track of the album, the soundtrack to a Blaxploitation film about a South Central gumshoe named Mr. T., Gaye’s falsetto coos of “I didn’t make it, sugar, playin’ by the rules” retroactively justifying to-go drinks regretted and only half remembered.
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