& COVER STORY with
Marvin Gaye I Want You (Motown) 1976
BY SOPE SOETAN
It was during the COVID lockdown that a then twenty-year- oldVenna would first explore I Want You .“I remember listening to a lot of Marvin Gaye, James Brown, and other old-school stuff at the time,” he says. “I had time on my hands, so I was just trying to study and whatnot.” He recalls being struck not only by the album’s music but by the story told through its packaging. For him, it stirred memories of familial moments and safe spaces unique to Black diasporic life.“It felt like a moment where everyone’s had a long day, or a long life even, and that was a moment that they all chose to kind of get together, create some fun, and let their hair down a bit,” he observes. Resembling what could be a blues dance, fete, jazz hall, juke joint, or speakeasy, the composition evokes a distinct Black sensibility that transcends country and generation. “These are all figures that we’ve seen in our lives, no matter where we are,” Venna says.“Whether we’re in Senegal, Jamaica, or down south in America.” That sense of familiarity was precisely what compelled Marvin to adopt The Sugar Shack for the I Want You artwork. As he put it, “It was ethnic and was something that people who are not colored or Black can look at and say, ‘Here’s a study of us.’” It was a decision the singer made against the wishes of Motown Records, which often tried to quell and minimize his creative choices. Executives preferred he simply use a photo of himself, but he insisted on something more abstract and interpretive. It was a lesson not only in sticking to your guns but also in surrendering to the music and allowing it to dictate its own aesthetic. Venna would reckon with this wisdom when creating the visual world that enveloped his 2025 debut LP, Malik . Assisted by contributions from Jorja Smith, Smino, MIKE, Leon Thomas, Marco Bernadis,Yussef Dayes, and Rocco Palladino, the album is a sumptuous suite of seventeen tracks that seamlessly flow and
“I’ve definitely been to some Jamaican hall parties as a kid that I shouldn’t have been at,” says Malik Venner, the saxophonist and producer known as Venna. Speaking from a London airport lobby, hours before a flight to Denmark, the Lewisham-born musician is pondering the motivations behind Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack . Hall parties—extravagant social gatherings held by West African and Caribbean communities in the U.K. to mark milestones such as weddings, birthdays, funerals, and anniversaries—were formative experiences for Venna, and the sensations he recalls experiencing in such atmospheres mirror what he sees in Barnes’s painting. A masterwork of neo-mannerism—a style marked by exaggerated, elongated forms— The Sugar Shack captures a scene of uninhibited Black bodies moving through a sweltering after-hours spot where music, movement, and decadence converge. Barnes described the painting as the recall of a formative experience from his childhood in Durham, North Carolina. “It was the first time my innocence met with the sins of dance,” he told the Japanese website Soul Museum. “The painting transmits rhythm, so the experience is re-created in the person viewing it. To show that African-Americans utilize rhythm as a way of resolving physical tension.” As I read Barnes’s statement over the phone,Venna takes it all in.“I understand why it stuck with him, and why he painted that memory,” he says. The Sugar Shack gained eternal cultural recognition when Marvin Gaye repurposed it for the cover of his 1976 album I Want You .The record was a controversial extension of the persona Gaye had adopted as soul music’s resident hedonist and loverman with Let’s Get It On in 1973.An aural manifestation of the singer’s innermost sexual proclivities and desire, it helped birth what we now know as quiet storm.
WaxPoetics 143
( opposite ) Venna in Egypt. Photos by Elliot Hensford and TJ Sawyerr.
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