Title: WAR- The World is a Ghetto Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Aug 28, 2015 Author:sneakypete Post Date:2015-08-28 19:28:45 by sneakypete Keywords:None Views:1446 Comments:13
Poster Comment:
IMHO,this is War's best album. Eric Burton may have all the political judgement of a retarded cockroach on crack,but she sure could write and play music that flowed.
His current record label, ABKCO Music, is fine with him not recording using "The Animals" as part of any band name -- and it owns the band's back catalogue. Burdon co-produced 'Til Your Well Runs Dry, had a hand in writing all but two of the 12 songs, and has faithful, solid supporting musicians to provide a consistently excellent and never monochromatic sound.
War, by the way, is present on the new album. Not the group, but the terrible real thing. It's the subject of the song "Memorial Day," with lyrics like: "On Memorial Day/Be Strong, let peace be the way/Break the cycle of hate and lies/Let the truth be realized/Memorial day... memorial day."
Burdon worried the song might be interpreted as denigrating Memorial Day and the tradition of paying respect to war dead. "It's a touchy subject," he acknowledges. "I really asked myself if I am doing the right thing here. I'm following my beliefs that we should learn how to diminish war so there is no need for Memorial Day.
"I'm not saying one shouldn't remember any friend that in the world passed on and no longer is here. Of course, you should. And I'm not trying to diminish what happens to young men in combat, for whatever reason they're there, if they're warriors in the thick of it.
"But I made the decision to do it because I think it's an interesting vision," he says of the song. "Every year, we have a remembrance of people who are dead, but we don't seem to make the move to do anything about the body count, to make it smaller by not going to war."
Another song, which has a slowed-down but seductive "Riot in Cell Block 9" vibe during which Burdon talks-sings in a Mose Allison manner, is called "Invitation to the White House." As he did in 1970's "Spill the Wine," Burdon recalls a dream -- only this one is more political than erotic as he gives the President advice on ending war:
"I said war is an addiction/And the junkies don't want to stop/They're making tons of money/With every drip of blood that drops."
"War is an addiction -- of course it is," Burdon says. "It's there; it's not going away. But if it's just constant war from one generation to another, something's wrong somewhere. Somebody has to be able to put the brakes on. Everything we need in life is here. Why should we attack somebody else? I don't get it.
"OK, so we got attacked by some demons from the sky and lost thousands of lives," he says. "But to react from vengeance and have massive troops going into maybe the right country, we're not sure -- maybe Iraq, maybe Iran, we're sure it's Afghanistan -- seems to me a crazy way to react.
What do you think of the last ten years or so, with America dragging around these wars?
Silly…SILLY…STUPID! There are ways of doing things, and to go to war for vengeance is the worst reason, that’s the worst reason you can go to war. We shouldn’t go to war unless we’re attacked, okay, and we’re at 9/11…they attacked us. There were soldiers in the armed forces who realized that we could take the countries that we believed were our enemies. We weren’t sure…nobody was sure of anything.
But you know, smaller, tighter groups of soldiers is what I think is what’s called for. You don’t send battalions of boots on the ground. It can be done. It first started in WWII with Britain’s Special Air Services, where guys would go behind the lines in jeeps and American Chevy trucks and take out the enemy airfields underground in the dark of night, but unfortunately America was lacking in intelligence in terms of the Middle East. We had to rebuild our intelligence, we were sadly lacking. That’s something that we’ve caught up on it. We had to restart. It became a world of terror and we still haven’t come down from it.
It also seems like, because it’s not televised the way, say, Vietnam was, there’s almost a blank look on people, like they forget it’s even going on.
If we didn’t learn from Vietnam…God save us! Okay, generals and officers can complain about renegade reporters, but there’s something to be said for that. And the whole thing about when we got the ‘embedded concept’ I thought, “Oh God, here we go…all we’re gonna get is ‘glory glory glory’ when we know that’s not the truth.”
