War starts playing. I’m tapping my foot, grooving to the beat.
The music could be a soundtrack in an action movie. A platoon of soldiers inserting clips into their assualt rifles, putting on Kevlar vests and charging out the barracks door.
How many people remember that the lyrics are actually strongly anti-war? Totally different from the music.
It’s a great song. I get pumped every time it plays. I never listened that closely to the lyrics.
I think Starr recognized the problem. He added Tapps to his Live performance.
For anyone not old enough to already be familiar with it’s lyrical intent, I could see the point that the arrangement and style call forth warlike imagery.
But you would have to blatantly ignore the lyrics to think it glorifies war. (Which, I imagine, some do.)
In all honesty, I never liked that song, not because it was anti-war, but because they lyrics are so, well, prosaic:
War! What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing!
I like Starr’s forceful rendition and his voice in general, and I get that people like or need lyrics that are obvious, but when compared with so many other anti-war songs, the lyrics are just not that great.
War is included on most Motown Hits Collections. I have three of them on my phone. Each has some different song. They all include War, Just My Imagination, Baby Love etc. the standards that Motown fans love.
I prefer the classic Motown sound of the Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Temptations.
Edwin Starr is more rock.
Funny how that happens. Other songs people never actually listen to the lyrics to include Born in the USA, Fortunate Son, Rocking in the Free World, and (I make this point at wedding receptions that it’s bad karma to play it) Scenes From an Italian Restaurant. And that of course is just the tip of the iceberg. People don’t listen to lyrics, though of course a lot of popular music doesn’t have lyrics worth listening to.
I can never get past the fact that a black man doesn’t seem to recognize that slaves were freed as a result of a war (US Civil War, for those in other countries). “Absolutely nothing”, huh?
Or how about “I Will Always Love You” (which is a BREAKUP song) or “Saving All My Love For You” (side piece is whining about how “her” guy hasn’t left his family for her yet)?
How has that song’s meaning gotten “lost?” Has it somehow been mis-used in a pro-war context? I must have missed that.
No one who was alive and aware of pop music at that time had any doubt what that song was about. It was quite a departure for Motown. Berry Gordy liked happy songs and didn’t like his artists to get too topical.
The lyrics: “War has shattered many a young man’s dreams. Made him disabled, bitter and mean” were not happy lyrics.
War. What is it good for. Absolutely nothing! Say it again.
War. What is it good for. Absolutely nothing!
It is right there at the beginning, and no station I ever listened to played an instrumental version that might be misconstrued. It was sung, and the words were clear.
Another good example, unless you’re Hollywood and think stalking is the ultimate in romance.
True, and I don’t think any sane person would dispute that. Still, when someone whose own ancestors presumably benefitted from a war by being freed from slavery claims there is never any positive result of a war, it just sounds stupid and dismissive of the people who did gain from it (such as, presumably, at least some of the ancestors of the black musicians in question).
Yeah. I just told My Beloved that somebody, until recently, didn’t realize it was an anti-war song, and she said “Did this person only ever hear it as elevator music all these years??”
I’ve never heard it as anything but an anti-war song. It’s obvious if you listen to the lyrics at all.
Some of the other commonly misunderstood songs have lyrics that can be misunderstood if taken out of context. If all you know about “Born in the U.S.A.” is the title line, you could take it as a statement of patriotic pride. If all you know of “Fortunate Son” are the lines, “Some folks are born made to wave the flag, Ooh, they’re red, white and blue,” you could think it was intended to be nationalistic. I don’t see anything like that in the lyrics of “War.”
As for “I Will Always Love You,” people who only saw the movie “The Bodyguard” or know the Whitney Houston recording are more inclined to see it as a declaration of undying passion. The intention is clearer in Dolly Parton’s original version. She wrote it not for a romantic partner, but for Porter Wagoner, her singing partner, when she broke away from him to start her solo career.
I wonder if there’s anyone who thinks the singer in 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” was actually not in love.
In a perfect society, war would never be a good thing. Humanity is not perfect, and in any human society, some of us will behave in imperfect ways that require imperfect means to deal with.
I think everyone would have to agree that it is an intrinsically bad thing to abduct someone by force, and keep him locked in a cage. But we empower our governments to do that on our behalf, as a way to deal with people who commit acts that we define as criminal, which are harmful to others. The primary function of government, in fact, is to create a system of laws, defining what behavior will be tolerated in a society, and what will not, and to restrain those who engage in the behaviors banned under these laws, to the harm of others.
At some level, war can be thought of in a similar way, on a larger scale. War is inherently bad, but sometimes, some nations will behave badly, to the harm of other nations, and war is the only way to restrain those badly-behaving nations.
