Introduction

What’s Going On? was produced in 1971 with a storyline from the perspective of a veteran that just came home from war in Vietnam. The 70s was a time full of social injustice, violence, and drug abuse. This album not only was supposed to tell a story, but it was also meant to be political and used as an outreach to the community around him.

Marvin Gaye’s most critical album of his career is due to his unwavering support for the black community, but because of his inspiring lyrics, the song can transcend past race. This album is about him wanting to see better days for the people around him along with himself. This report will be a sentiment analysis based on the lyrics from this album.

From the songs: “Whats Going On?”, “Flyin’ High in the Friendly Sky”, “Right On”, and “Inner City Blues” It can be inferred that the sentiments will be positive creating a tone that implies hope, future happiness, and anticipation.

library(tidyverse)
library(tidytext)
library(genius)
library(wordcloud2)

Top 50 words

The top 10 words from this album that can be paired with sentiment are love, alright, feel, live, bring, brother, lord, mother, picket, and god. To assess those words from their context, those along with the top 50 have been placed in a wordcloud. The next step is to use NRC lexicon from textdata to assess the emotions or connotations those words hold.

In this data set, we are excluding filler words like ah, baby, yeah, and oh along with names of the title which can be heard in the chorus on his songs.

## Warning in request_GET(session, url): Not Found (HTTP 404).
## Joining, by = c("artist", "title")
## Warning: `cols` is now required.
## Please use `cols = c(lyrics)`
## Joining, by = "word"

Of course love is the first thing that is seen in this wordcloud because Marvin Gaye’s positive songwriting focuses on love through the struggle. There were 17 instances of love in the entire album.

When the nrc textdata test was conducted. We find out that out of the top 10 words, only 5 words were assigned a sure sentiment through the NRC lexicon. The 5 words left to assess were love, brother, lord, mother, picket, god.

Using those 5, the words that were left were rated on the NRC system from 1-10. 1-trust 2-fear 3-negative 4-sadness 5-anger 6-surprise 7-positive 8-disgust 9-joy 10-anticipation.

## Joining, by = "word"
## # A tibble: 54 x 2
##    word         n
##    <chr>    <int>
##  1 feeling     10
##  2 money        6
##  3 mother       6
##  4 awful        5
##  5 dying        5
##  6 enslaved     5
##  7 fortune      5
##  8 god          5
##  9 hate         5
## 10 hatred       5
## # … with 44 more rows

To understand the sentiment, we can go back to the marving_song_lyrics table pulled from our genius data base to dive into the context and make the argument for each word.

## # A tibble: 101 x 5
##    artist     title          track_title     line lyric                         
##    <chr>      <chr>          <chr>          <int> <chr>                         
##  1 Marvin Ga… What's Going … What’s Going …     1 Mother, mother                
##  2 Marvin Ga… What's Going … What’s Going …     2 There's too many of you crying
##  3 Marvin Ga… What's Going … What’s Going …     3 Brother, brother, brother     
##  4 Marvin Ga… What's Going … What’s Going …     4 There's far too many of you d…
##  5 Marvin Ga… What's Going … What’s Going …     5 You know we've got to find a …
##  6 Marvin Ga… What's Going … What’s Going …     6 To bring some loving here tod…
##  7 Marvin Ga… What's Going … What’s Going …     7 Father, father                
##  8 Marvin Ga… What's Going … What’s Going …     8 We don't need to escalate     
##  9 Marvin Ga… What's Going … What’s Going …     9 You see, war is not the answer
## 10 Marvin Ga… What's Going … What’s Going …    10 For only love can conquer hate
## # … with 91 more rows

Results

love

2 - fear : Used 17 times, majorily in Right On, and What’s Going On?. Love is used “Oh, when we love each other” / “True love can conquer hate everytime”

Marvin Gaye is trying to spread awareness through the emotion of fear during a time of reconstruction in the black community, there were a lot of issues with brutality amongst themseleves and from the police. This song was used as an agent of peace though the tone of fear.

brother:

2 - fear : Used 4 times, heard in Right On and What’s Going On? “Brother, brother, brother” / “Ah, true love, love, love for your brother” in context is a statement of reassurement to unify our people in the nation. However, it can be argued that in the reassurement, there is an underlying fear that is causing this constant promotion for unity and reassurement.

lord:

4 - sadness: used 4 times. When Marvin Gaye says lord, it stems from sadness. It is a cry out for external spiritual help. In Flying High in the Friendly Sky, Marvin Gaye sings “Oh Lord, and have laid their bodies down” / “Oh Lord, So stupid minded”. He is reminding us about how sad it is to be heavily involved with drugs and their recreational use which tore Gaye apart. Gaye creates commentary on the community around him. He knows that using drugs leaves people behind and using it heavily does not solve the problems he has, it only causes self-destruction.

mother:

6 - surprise: Used 4 times, when Gaye sings “Mother, Mother” in What’s Going On, we can say that it is a surprise because there is a shift in the tone of his message. In this ending verse, he proclaims “We have to find a way to bring some understanding today”. In Verse 1 and 2 he mentions “We have to find a way to bring some loving here today”. His statement creates an air of certainty in not just loving, but understanding as well creating motion and action in his words.

picket:

4 - sadness: used 4 times. “Picket lines and picket signs” is a strong line in the Chorus of What’s Going On. This line addresses police brutality and the wickedness of the world that causes such dissonance. This instance in the song takes the time to show his sadness and remorse for those who have fallen.

god:

5- anger: Used 3 times, in Right On, he sings “For the soul that takes pride in his God”, and the tone of the song becomes one that has just vindication. He is singing about those who take their religion and themselves too seriously to love their neighbor enough or respect their livelihood and decisions.

Other words used in this album like enslaved, money, awful, dying, hate which all show anger towards the situaions Gaye faced in his world everyday.

Conclusion

The overall tone assigned by the nrc test was negative having to deal with fear, anger, and sadness. I think we can justify that a lot of the sentiments were negative in their emotions but in context deemed positive. Marvin Gaye is not a negative singer/songwriter. The album: What’s Going On? was a political call to action for the world and a wake up call to the black community that was struggling internally and externally.

The connotation on the words pulled were negative in nrc sentiment but we all know that the connotation was positive in progression of police brutality, drugs, and violence.