WAR – The World Is a Ghetto

We finally know how old Carlos really is

War! What is it good for? Well, it turns out it’s pretty good for Latin- and jazz-infused hippy jam party funk rock crossover records.

The early 70s — especially 1972 — were interesting times. Americans discovered their president was, in fact, a crook… then re-elected him anyway. The Vietnam War was starting to really look like a bad idea. The last Japanese soldier from WWII was captured in his Guam jungle hideout. Charles Manson had his death sentence commuted. And across the western world, gonorrhoea, syphilis and unplanned pregnancies were conspiring to make the 60s seem as stupid as they looked.

But it wasn’t all bad news maaan. Millennials hadn’t yet ruined everything. The first scientific handheld calculator and the Atari home gaming console hit the shops. Plus there was a flood of future ‘all-time classic’ music being released — including a surprising number of albums that have already featured in my and generally our reliquary sheet.

Though or the purposes of this Birthstopper exercise, I’ve (hopefully) got something few of you will have heard in War’s, The World Is a Ghetto.

I’ve had a long relationship with this record. I came across it decades ago at a garage sale, bundled in with about a dozen or so random funk albums — Jackson 5, Sly & the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic, James Brown. It was my first proper exposure to funk music, and I have particularly fond nostalgic feelings about this War album, which, for whatever reason, was a regular on the turntable during late-night card games at a share house I lived in with some friends. War had two epically big hits that most probably know — “Spill the Wine” (with Eric Burdon) and “Low Rider” — but they’ve become somewhat obscure over the years, at least compared to other artists in that garage sale haul. Which is surprising, considering how commercially successful this album was. The World Is a Ghetto was the biggest selling album of 1973, outselling The Stones, Elton John, and Led Zeppelin — which, once you listen to the album, gives you an idea of just how much pot people were smoking at the time.

The music is a real melting pot. The band — a mix of jazz, funk and Latin players that somehow managed to blend in country and prog flavours along with extended hippy rock jams. I’ve always found this album enjoyable for its dynamic range in songwriting, tone and instrumentation. There’s a lot going on, and the musicianship is elite, with everyone getting moments to shine — but none more than the rhythm section: drummer/percussionists Harold Brown and Papa Dee Allen, and bassist B.B. Dickerson. The groove is immaculate all the way through and an absolute highlight. While I enjoy the album as a whole, “The Cisco Kid” is probably my favourite track. That I don’t really have any other standout tracks is, ironically, my main critique. It’s a very jammy album, with an emphasis on performance and tone rather than hooks and strong songcraft. The instrumental “City, Country, City” — intended to sound like a road trip — features great individual performances, but it’s just too long and doesn’t really pay off. It’s the most obvious example of the band (and producer Jerry Goldstein) perhaps getting a little too caught up in the musical effect and excitement of the quadraphonic sound the album was released in.

While The World Is a Ghetto didn’t birth a genre, it’s a worthy inclusion in #Birthstopper — not just because it’s a relatively obscure smash hit, but also because it offered something a bit different. At a time when the charts were heavy with “rock” artists like Zappa, Genesis, The Stones and Zeppelin — bands folding blues, funk and jazz into rock — War went the other way, incorporating prog and rock elements into Latin-infused jazz funk. They were a direct influence in form on Bob Marley (who even dedicated a his song war to WAR), who would go on to massive success once he adopted the WAR formula of adding white radio-friendly country sounds like slide guitar and pop song structures into his reggae and dance-hall style. And you can’t tell me Fleetwood Mac didn’t straight-up rip off “Beetles in the Bog” for Tusk.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it — at least a little.