A Film Canon

 

 

This magnificent album presents fraternity as theology, with sympathetic, impassioned conversation as its central revelation. Virtually all the songs offer some impetus or incentive to talk, while friendship is characterised as the most important form of human interaction, capable of achieving a sublimity encapsulated in Gaye's central admission that "God is my friend", which might be just as accurately rearranged as "friendship is my God". This tends to militate against the more pessimistic, prophetic elements, producing a contradictory tone that is only resolved in the seamlessness with which one track blends into another, as if the continuity between picket line and afterparty were translated into musical terms. In particular, the title song haunts all the others, albeit in an increasingly echoed, distorted form, until the evocative impossibility of its promise closes the album as the epilogue to "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)", the most melancholy moment.