The album for which the term “TMI” was likely invented. The album that perfected porn music as we know it. And the album shares the honor of being one of only two divorce-themed masterpieces produced in any genre (see below). But it’s not just about a divorce, it’s because of one. This 30th anniversary edition of Marvin’s pained 1978 epic features alternate takes, disco mixes, and tell-all notes by official court-of-soul biographer David Ritz. None, though, are better than the album’s own tell-all.
In 1959, Berry Gordy’s sister Anna met Marvin. He credits her with getting his lazy ass to the recording studio. They soon married. The rest is musical history and sexual mystery. The divorce wasn’t pretty or cheap, not least because he jetted from her arms to get amorous with 17-year-old Janis Hunter—a common-law union that produced two children, including Matrix trilogy warrior-princess Nona. Marvin, on the verge of bankruptcy and eviction, is told by the judge to donate proceeds of his next album to Anna.
Into the lab he disappears, and a year later, oops there it is: The bitter, irony-tinged Here, My Dear. No one, not George Clinton or Prince, has ever used R&B’s confessional mode more paradoxically to both sarcastic and romantic effect. When he’s not reminding Anna how much he used to love to rock her world and be rocked in return, he’s crying over the asscrack-extracting settlement and all it says about so-called true love.
You can probably enjoy its sweeping, soul-operatic venom from either side of a nasty split—the side laughing or the side crying all the way to the bank. The same falsetto that made us swoon over the plight of sky-high returning Vietnam soldier–junkies now whistles straight-up private talk through Anna’s ear to us. Consider it the longest, most lyrical, head-nod-able, and vengeful break-up letter ever put to wax.
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