War is celebrating the 50th anniversary of their hugely successful third studio album, The World is a Ghetto.
The milestone will be marked on Friday, November 24, with the Record Store Day Black Friday release of a 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition of the record; a limited-edition five-LP box set, featuring a newly remastered edition of the album, with six unreleased bonus tracks; and unreleased “the making of” recordings showing the evolution of the album’s six original songs.
War founding member Lonnie Jordan, who curated the project along with War’s producer, Jerry Goldstein, and Jeremy Levine, tells ABC Audio that when he thinks about recording the album, his greatest memory is of summertime and the kids in Long Beach, California, who’d listen to the music coming out of their recording truck. He reveals that Snoop Dogg was one of those kids.
Jordan says when they first started recording the album’s iconic track, it was originally supposed to be about a “ghetto man.” But they soon realized “we were recording about a situation, a moment” and the song took on a different message.
“We were pretty much talking about the ghetto man being no different from a person who had more than him,” he explains. “And we’re all one, whether we know it or not.”
The World is a Ghetto wound up spending two weeks at #1 and became the biggest selling album of 1973, something Jordan and his bandmates never expected.
“We was as surprised as anyone else, because we never even thought any of our music would ever be played on the radio,” he shares. “We just pretty much just played what we felt. All of our music was really an experience, you know, from the streets.”
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