Love Train

On first listen Love Train, the 1972 O'Jays hit penned by Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, comes across as a typically non-sensical slice of Seventies hippie idealism, wherein the song's writers suggest that world-wide peace and love could be achieved if people all over the world were to join hands to form a Love Train. Not the most practical of ideas, but inoffensive, and a useful insight into the unrealistically optimistic mindset of the time.

But on closer inspection the lyrics take on a peculiar political slant. The very call for peace at the heart of the song recognises the existence of world conflict, and during the first verse the invitation to join the Love Train is extended to Russia, and China too. "Don't you know that it's time to get on board" they are told, leaving us in no doubt as to where the responsibility for the world's ills lie. Yes, it is America's Cold War adversaries that need to change their ways and "get on board", whilst America is a place where the summer of love never ended, where the counter culture won the day, and where the foreign policies of Henry Kissinger are a mere inconvenience to be overlooked, leaving the O'Jays free to speak as ambassadors of a nation that is a force for peace and love.

Try asking the disappeared of Chile, the hundreds of thousands butchered in East Timor, or the napalmed and carpet bombed people of Indo-China how much of a force for peace the United States was during the Seventies. The evidence of America's complicity in these events is slowly mounting with the release of official documents, and rather than retread that evidence here I would point you in the direction of Christopher Hitchin's thoroughly accessible "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" for an insight into the international impact America's foreign policy at the time that Love Train was released.

Any suggestion that Gamble and Huff were wholly ignorant of foreign affairs seems unlikely, as the second verse of Love Train pairs Egypt and Israel, inviting the two on board the Love Train, showing at least a passing knowledge of the conflict in the Middle East. How ironic that the participants of 1967's six day war are invited to mend their ways and embrace this American ideal of peace and love. The Egyptian and Israeli people must have puzzled greatly over this call for peace presented to them on behalf of America, the very nation that had gone to such great lengths to ensure that both countries were fully armed and capable of war in the first place.

But let us for a moment accept the song's premise on face value, stretch our imaginations (it is a considerable stretch) and envisage a world that has been brought to a peaceful state by a disco song. Just what form does this idyllic post Love Train world take? Well, the very use of the word train could imply industrialisation, and as it is not industrialised America that needs to "get on board" but the other nations of the world, it seems safe to assume that America has no intention of changing. Its just everyone else that needs to be more like America. The real invitation of the song might as well be: people all over the world, abandon your alien foreign customs and open yourselves up to the free market capitalism of the industrialised world. Indeed, the only time that the O'Jays truly seem to be speaking for America is when they tell "all of you brothers in Africa" that "you don't need no money", because here we are thirty years on and sure enough they don't have any.

So here we have a seemingly idealistic hippie call for peace that is in reality a denial of the nature of Seventies American foreign policy, complicit in the wider misrepresentation by the American mainstream media of world affairs to the American public. For a detailed analysis of the nature and extent of this misrepresentation refer to Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's unnerving "Manufacturing Consent". But whilst the media worlds of newsprint and television were largely owned by American big business with a vested interest in the country's dominant position in the world economy, how does hippie ideology fit into this picture? Can the hippie counter culture really have moved in just a few short years, from the protest songs and peace rallies of the Sixties, to this sorry exercise in denial? The saddest thing about the lyrics of Love Train is that they do indeed symbolise the way in which hippie idealism had turned from a dream for genuine change and empowerment to a handful of meaningless phrases suitable only for use in Coke adverts. And so, where they should have been shouting their disquiet about America's relationship with murderous regimes around the world, Gamble and Huff were happy to follow the official line, laying the blame for the world's ills elsewhere, allowing Kissinger to continue his "work".