Sex & Suffering – Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sanctified Lady,’ ‘Savage In The Sack,’ & ‘Masochistic Beauty’
In observance of the 40th anniversary of Marvin Gaye's death, DEF|Y|NE Media dissects his final three songs and how they reflect the dark side of his plight to fuse God and sex.
In the Bible’s Old Testament, the Songs of Solomon poetically expresses how to treat your woman before and while making love. It describes sex as a holy covenant between man and bride.
The adjacency of sex and religion has long been taboo in Christian circles. Marvin Gaye, a devout believer in Christ and a staunch connoisseur of earthly temptation, sought to reclaim the holy amalgamation between the spirit and the flesh throughout his career. It came to a head with the release of his 1973 album, Let’s Get It On.
Despite his professional success as a sex symbol, Gaye had a conflicting viewpoint of women and sex in his personal life.
(Marvin Gaye in concert on Sept. 29, 1976, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Photo credit: Evening Standard/Getty Images)
On one hand, he disliked contorting his peerless voice to excite women while he was on stage, and even grew resentful of them for constantly chasing and ogling him. On the other hand, he he felt empathetic toward women to the point where identified with them on the inside.
By the early 1980s, Gaye’s life and psyche grew more disheveled and confusing. Two divorces, a cocaine addiction, and debilitating debt led him to a self-exile from the United States.
Gaye’s music still reflected his life, and the dichotomy of God and sex had become even more extreme. He reached a breaking point in his lifelong struggle to reconcile his inner polarity of serving the Lord and succumbing to his lustful instincts. As a result, his lyricism became less poetic and more literal.
This struggle played out in three songs recorded in the final years of his life: “Sanctified Lady,” “Savage in the Sack” and “Masochistic Beauty.” These songs made their debut in the top half of Marvin Gaye’s 1985 album, Dream of a Lifetime, released a year following his murder.
SANCTIFIED LADY
In 1981, Gaye signed a three-album deal with CBS, ending his long tenure with Motown Records. The following year, he released Midnight Love, the last album released in his lifetime. The album’s lead single, “Sexual Healing,” became a pop and R&B smash, earning him his first two Grammy wins and propelling Midnight Love to being the highest-selling album of his career.
At the tale end of Gaye’s exile, he began collaborating with his brother-in-law, guitarist Gordon Banks. Together, they would craft many songs that led to Midnight Love. One song that Gaye was particularly fond: “Sanctified Pussy,” as Gaye called it. He even referenced the song during Midnight Love’s press run and to his audience on tour, despite the song not making the tracklist.
Built on a rubber band bassline, Banks’ subtle rhythmic guitar swirl and polyrhythmic dance beat from the Roland T-808 drum machine, “Sanctified Pussy” chronicled Gaye’s yearning to find a loving companion to fulfilled his unattainable ideal of a God-fearing woman of purity.
(Photo credit: David Gahr)
The lyrics painted the picture of Gaye observing how the decadent environment of random sex leads to disease; “Girlfriend here, boyfriend there/Herpes germ everywhere.” He describes his unshakeable drug abuse as well as everyone else’s; “Some girls smoke, some girls taste/some girls toot some girls base.”
Gaye pleads to have a sanctified lady, or sanctified pussy, to avoid the pitfalls of hedonism. He mentions he wants a “good old church girl,” a woman who’ll “read the Bible” but will still make love to him “all night long.”
His desire for a girl “I can respect” is punctuated by the background vocals performed by The Waters. Throughout the song they harmonize on “Sanctified” and later toward the end they let out repeatedly the name of “Jesus!,” as Gaye sings that he wants a woman to save herself in the name of the Savior so that she’ll be pure for him.
(Marvin Gaye on stage with guitarist, musical director, and brother-in-law, Gordon Banks.)
Gaye set this precedent in 1973 when he ended the title track “Let’s Get It On” with the ad-lib, “I’ve been sanctified.” On the reprise, “Keep Gettin’ It On,” he made things even more plain by saying “Oh, Jesus, trying to tell the people, To come on and get it on/Yes, Lord!”
Author David Ritz explained in Gaye’s biography, Divided Soul, that it was a maximalist transition of an ideal that Gaye had expressed for over a decade. “It was Marvin’s attempt to merge the profane with the profound,” Ritz wrote, “to integrate his two strongest sources of emotional enthusiasm – God and Sex. He knew it was the only way he could be happy.”
One of the factors that kept the song off Midnight Love is that CBS, understandably, balked over the title “Sanctified Pussy.” Many of Gaye’s friends, like former Motown composer and arranger Clarence Paul, didn’t take him seriously, but Gaye wasn’t kidding.
Following Gaye’s death, Banks, and Midnight Lover supervising producer Harvey Fuqua, cleaned up the rough, 4-track demo and used it as Dream of a Lifetime’s opening track and lead single. The title was changed to “Sanctified Lady,” although Gaye can still be heard in the mix singing “sanctified pussy” during each chorus. “Sanctified Lady” reached No. 2 on the Billboard R&B charts. It would be Gaye’s last single as a lead artist to reach the Top 10 R&B charts.
SAVAGE IN THE SACK
The next song was conceived in 1979 during Gaye’s exile. Originally called “Dem Niggers Are Savage In The Sack,” Ritz described the song as a “comical investigation of the cultural myths of Blacks’ potent sexuality.”
Ritz wrote that Gaye most likely had no intention of releasing the song and that he recorded it as a farce to humorously shock studio guests. However, it reflected Gaye’s “own fear of being unable to live up to the legend” of the libidinous Black sex machine.
CBS needed to include the unfinished song on Dream of a Lifetime to bluster the tracklist, with the amended title, “Savage in the Sack.” Fuqua and Banks fashioned the tune with a sparse vibraphone theme, a marching, spacey synth bass as Gaye quasi-mumbled through the song, sounding nearly indiscernible:
Not too long ago, I told a friend
I ain’t had none
Since you and Lord know when
Stayed up for days
Never been satisfied
Soon as I get ya, baby
I’ll make you cry
‘Cause savage, baby
Savage in the sack
(Marvin Gaye, winning his Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance in 1983 for “Sexual Healing.” Photo credit: Getty Images)
The foundation of Gaye’s overall view on sex stemmed from an encounter as a young man in the U.S. Air Force. He lost his virginity to a heavy-set prostitute who berated him for being inexperienced. This not only set in motion his ongoing self-consciousness with sex (he suffered from impotence in the late 1970s) but also a growing dependency on prostitutes, keeping the intercourse purely transactional, devoid of emotion, obligation & expectations.
“Savage in the Sack” may have been created with thumb in cheek (The Waters can be heard singing “Dem Niggers” in the background vocals, slightly drowned out with the re-recorded refrain “It’s getting bigger”), but remains a living testament of Gaye’s life-long cynicism and insecurities when it came to women.
MASOCHISTIC BEAUTY
The final song came from the Midnight Love sessions. This song fell between the ominous confession of “Sanctified Lady” and the purposeful humor of “Savage In The Sack,” and turned out to be the darkest, most revealing of the three.
Like the first two tracks, it started with a different title; “Let Me Spank Your Booty (My Masochistic Beauty).” It features Gaye “rapping” in a faux-British accent as he gives sexual orders of sadomasochism (S&M) to a woman.
Gaye held a longtime affinity for England and its people. When he first went there in 1964 when “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” became his first British hit, he expressed his attraction to the culture. “The English people and I shared an immediate rapport,” Gaye said in his biography. “They brought the aristocrat out of me, and they could see how much I love listening to them speak.”
(Marvin Gaye, in Ostend, Belgium during his exile from America, circa early 1980’s.)
Over a more slinky, funky rhythm guitar playing from Banks, Gaye insists that Satan is fueling her lust and he’s going to punish her before giving her the sex she desires from him:
You silly little freak
Tryin’ to rise
The devil’s strong in you
It’s in your eyes
The thing that’s deep in you
You can’t resist
I’m gonna tie you up and have my wish
He demeans her more, calling her a “nasty little slave” and a “selfish little bitch” while telling her to “shut up” as she moans. He further asserted his dominance, saying “It’s my duty/to spank your booty.”
Things get even more complex when he equates her yearning to get close to the Lord which he is also trying to do, but he elevates himself higher and more righteous than she:
Your guilt becomes your key
To turn to God
Although I am a part of this Like you
I am a master man With work to do
You must obey my will
Or face my rod
‘Cause if you can’t for me
You can’t for God
This plays on both his suppressed anger and resentment for his female fans who wanted to be close to him. It also exemplifies his own father’s justification for whipping Gaye as a child for not following his command and straying from the word of God as a child.
Unfortunately, this also played out in his relationship with his second wife, Janis Hunter. Gaye admitted in Divided Soul that he tormented her physically and psychologically. He acted out his need to play both sides of the fence, propping her up as a figure of purity, while forcing her into infidelity to fulfill his own masochistic fantasy of having other men pleasing his woman.
(Marvin Gaye performs on stage on July 1, 1980 at De Doelen in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Photo credit: Rob Verhorst/Getty Images)
Gaye’s most sensuous songs, such as “Let’s Get It On,” “I Want You,” “After The Dance” and “Come Get To This,” display his prophetic ability to express the physical nature of intercourse between two consenting adults. When you look beyond the surface, you start to understand his unparalleled, and at the time, unprecedented way of fusing sex and God.
Unfortunately, for all the highs of those celebrated classics, “Sanctified Lady,” “Savage in the Sack” and “Masochistic Beauty” illustrated that Gaye’s life, whether by circumstance or his instigation, imploded as the dueling powers of his due diligence to Christianity and his insatiable lust for women and power expanded with equal measure. In the end, each side was rendered incapable of reconciliation. The darkness and discomfort of his lyrics inspired the accompanying music to reflect as such.
The robust, steamy warmth of songs like “Distant Lover” and “Come Live With Me, Angel” are absent from the Dream of a Lifetime tracks. The once inviting sonic signifiers were replaced by a foggy, hazy scattershot vibe that was as frenetic and unpredictable as the cocaine he was snorting and freebasing. But what draws them all together is that every song is just as transparent as the last.
That’s what Marvin Gaye lived for. He wanted his life to be a canvas from which he created his music, even at the expense of inflicting unending suffering upon himself. As he once sang, “The artist pays the price, so you won’t have to pay…”
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