"You're the Man" is a two-part 1972 funk

Funk

Funk is a music genre that originated in the mid-late 1960s when African American musicians blended soul music, jazz and R&B into a rhythmic, danceable new form of music. Funk de-emphasizes melody and harmony and brings a strong rhythmic groove of electric bass and drums to the foreground...

 single released by American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 soul

Soul

A soul in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions is the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing or object. Many philosophical and spiritual systems teach that humans have souls, and others teach that all living things and even inanimate objects have souls. The...

 singer Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye

Marvin Pentz Gay, Jr. , better known by his stage name Marvin Gaye, was an American singer-songwriter and musician with a three-octave vocal range....

 on the Tamla (Motown) label. On this song, Gaye blatantly attacks the policies set by the government which he felt had not giving people in America

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 the benefits to live in society. The song was a blatant attack on the then-U.S.

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 president Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon

Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...

 during a tense election year and a song in which an angry yet falsetto Gaye blurted "politics and hypocrites/is turning us all into lunatics". The song's then-controversial message was probably too much for Motown, who Gaye felt had neglected radio play of the song, which led to Gaye's withdrawing of the album of the same name later that year. The song rose to number seven on the R&B singles chart and stalled at number fifty on the pop singles chart. The parent album of this song has still yet to be released by Motown. Another version of the song featured a faster tempo version with a tenor

Tenor

The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...

 Gaye singing in his trademark vocal multi-tracking.

Both versions were released on the Deluxe reissue of Let's Get It On

Let's Get It On

Let's Get It On is the twelfth studio album by American soul musician Marvin Gaye, released August 28, 1973, on Tamla Records. Recording sessions for the album took place during June 1970 to July 1973 at Hitsville U.S.A. and Golden World Studio in Detroit, and at Hitsville West in Los Angeles...

.

Chart performance

Chart (1971)	Peak position
U.S. Billboard Hot 100 Billboard Hot 100 The Billboard Hot 100 is the United States music industry standard singles popularity chart issued weekly by Billboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on radio play and sales; the tracking-week for sales begins on Monday and ends on Sunday, while the radio play tracking-week runs from Wednesday...	50
U.S. Hot Selling Soul Singles Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, is a chart released weekly by Billboard in the United States.The chart, initiated in 1942, is used to track the success of popular music songs in urban, or primarily African American, venues. Dominated over the years at various times by jazz, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, soul,...	7