War (The Temptations song)

Williams and Edwards deliver the song's anti-war, pro-peace message over a stripped-down instrumental track, with bass singer Melvin Franklin chanting a repeated recruit training-like "hup, two, three, four" in the background during the verses.

Fans from across the country, many of them college students and other young people, sent letters to Motown requesting the release of "War" as a single.

The label did not want to risk the image of its most popular male group, and the Temptations themselves were also apprehensive about releasing such a potentially controversial song as a single.

It replaced "Make It With You" by Bread, and was itself taken out of the spot by another Motown single, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Diana Ross.

The song was released by the Stop the War Coalition and credited to Ugly Rumours, with the band being fronted by a lookalike of Blair.

To build on the chart success of "Two Tribes", "War" became the subject of an accomplished extended remix in its own right (subtitled "Hidden") for the third version of single's UK 12-inch.

Impressionist Chris Barrie voiced the long soliloquy about war and love, while impersonating the American President Ronald Reagan; a role he would later reprise in the hit UK TV Show Spitting Image.

Born in Germany, Barrie translated and subversively quoted Adolf Hitler from his failed 1924 putsch trial, in the first new lines added to the song.

[22] "War" was performed in concert by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in 1985, added to the set list for the final few shows of their lengthy Born in the U.S.A. Tour.

A year earlier, he had suggested the same, as a loose protest against Reagan administration foreign policy in Central America and elsewhere, but the band had been unable to come up with an effective arrangement.

[24] The popular culture centered publication Stereogum released an article by music journalist Tom Breihan in January 2019 that retrospectively highlighted Edwin Starr's version of "War" as one of the greatest number one singles in the history of the Billboard Hot 100.

In terms of musical genre and overall style, Breihan remarked that the "groove is huge and all-consuming", particularly since the listener will "hear little accents of guitar or saxophone in between the beats" yet "every instrument on the song, including Starr’s voice, is part of the rhythm section."

"[41] Music critic David Fricke has argued about Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's version of the song that "Springsteen gets right to the point, dedicating it to the post-Vietnam kids in the crowd ('The next time they’re gonna be lookin’ at you') before leading the E Street Band into an explosive reading of the... hit with his best tonsil-ripping yell".

Fricke praised the band's overall performance of the track and other songs during its 1970s and 1980s concerts in the pages of the popular culture magazine Rolling Stone.