War: The World Is a Ghetto: 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition Album Review – Warungku Terkini

While the fluid nature of the music makes The World Is a Ghetto feel loose and spontaneous, it’s often meticulously crafted. On the set’s bonus disc of alternate takes, the band works out different approaches to “The Cisco Kid,” the album’s opening track, which moves atop a chassis of conga, kick drum, and bass. One attempt is dismissed as sounding too much like “Shaft,” leading someone in the band to suggest they call their version “Shift.” The version that made the record is one of the era’s definitive rhythms. Jordan matches the groove with his keyboard, which he runs through distortion, and picks out notes one by one. Together, it feels like a thousand little stipples of percussion ducking effortlessly in and out of one another, a minor miracle of precision played with the good-time vibes of a few guys jamming in the sea breeze at Bluff Park on a Saturday afternoon.

“City, Country, City,” which was originally composed for the 1973 film A Name for Evil, shows War at their most conceptually ambitious. As the title suggests, the song rambles back and forth between a cowpoke country-gospel mode and a long funk jam played at freeway speed. The former might be the album’s best moment. It feels bathed in the glow of a long sundown, with Oskar playing a slack harmonica line over clip-clopping drums. When the band bursts into pacier sections, Charles Miller’s reverb-drenched saxophone takes the lead. He doesn’t match the battering of the rhythm section so much as smooth out their chopping, gesturing toward overblowing without ever quite getting there. It’s a strange mix—it makes the song feel plump at the edges and thin in the middle; one wonders what a more active sax player might have done with it.

While The World is a Ghetto is a collective triumph, the individual band members’ personalities come through more strongly on the jams collected on the bonus LP. While “L.A. Sunshine” would eventually find its way to 1977’s Platinum Jazz in dramatically different form, the embryonic version here is a showcase for Jordan’s piano playing. In a flourish, he moves from an absurdly fast and mechanically precise salsa rhythm into a solo that flits through R&B triplets, hammered chords that nearly predict house music, and an eloquent run of notes that begins as Debussy and resolves into the blues. Behind him, Dickerson’s bass and Howard E. Scott’s guitar chase one another around a palindrome of a riff, nearly oblivious to the rest of the band. It’s an incredible moment, more inventive and sprightly than anything that made its way onto the final album. Jordan lets loose again on “Lee’s Latin Jam” with a waterfall of notes, while on “War Is Coming,” the whole band generates a hazy desert blues and basks in its heat.

The reissue package also includes three LPs of side-long tracks that stitch various jams, work sessions, and studio chatter into more or less coherent chronologies of how each of the original album’s six songs came together. While it’s interesting to follow the album’s evolution, and the production makes the narrative flow of each song’s history surprisingly easy to engage , it’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t already living deeply inside of these grooves returning to them after a preliminary listen.

War made themselves singular by celebrating the many cultures that surrounded them—not synthesizing diverse inspirations into a perfect union so much as giving it all equal space to shine. The World Is a Ghetto is a landmark album of ’70s funk, one that deserves to be remembered alongside the best work of the Meters, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Sly and the Family Stone. The group’s signature sound was amorphous, and the depth of their impact isn’t as obvious as that of those bands. But the syncretic funk they forged, which reached its pinnacle on The World Is a Ghetto, is a personal and musical realization of the social harmony they spent their career fighting for.