Maybe you had to be there to get how incredibly pervasive Vietnam was in culture, especially youth culture. Any song about war - about the government, or the president, or the establishment - meant a song about “Vietnam.” Not WWII or the Civil War or any “good” wars. Trying to make others understand that “good” wars were obsolete was all that mattered. The government was lying to us, feeding hundreds of thousands of young men, disproportionately black, into the grinder of jungle war, and heavily propagandizing to make any critics enemies of the state. The President of the United States had a literal, written out enemies list.
I don’t blame people today who just hear the riff and want to shout it out loud. Nobody later can imagine those times. Just like we in the “youth culture” couldn’t imagine what it was like to live through a time when wars were “good,” every action of the government was laudable, and critics were literally enemies of the state. The world flipped in a quarter century.
It’s flipped again since. Into an incoherent splat rather than a cultural whole, but totally different. You hadda be there.
I was going to say, literally from the very first time I heard it, it was clearly anti-war. Maybe if you don’t speak the language you may be confused, but the lyrics aren’t buried, they’re not subtle at all, they hit you immediately, and they are repeated. Hell, there’s barely any backing music in the intro part, just some stabs here and there. You actively have to be not listening to miss it.
I like that part. It very much gives it a protest chant-like quality to it. I thought that’s exactly what it was trying to echo, from the rhythms to the verbiage. Think of protest chants. How complicated are they usually?
I also was born well after the song was released and I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard the full song (only clips from compilation album commercials and maybe soundtracks?), and I knew it was anti-war, just from those lines.
Edwin Starr…? Here all this time I thought this was performed by the bandWar. [always fully grokked the intended meaning tho, having been a lyric hound since I was in preschool]
Note I got into the topic of banal anti-war songs this past week in another thread with the Damned song “In Dulce Decorum” which apparently disagrees with Winston Churchill that they shouldn’t have fought the Germans at all, but is more than willing to throw in their lot with the likes of Lord Haw Haw.
In “Jingo” one of the Night Watch, more or less conscripted, quotes these lines. Nobby responds “getting rid of evil dictators, for one.” I don’t own that one, so that is very vaguely what he says.
pTerry says it best, as usual.
I was also too young for the Edwin Starr version and first heard the Frankie Goes To Hollywood cover. It was the b-side of “Two Tribes” (hint: also an anti-war song, about the Cold War to be precise) and also on “Welcome To The Pleasure Dome”, I still own my 40 years old copy. When Bruce Springsteen’s version was released on “Live 1975-85” (which I got for my 18th birthday from friends) and on single, I thought he had covered FGTH, and I don’t remember when I first heard the Edwin Starr version. But it was clear to me from the beginning that it’s an anti-war anthem, it’s so very obvious.
