THE BEAT GOES ON: Randy Newman

 

Ask the average Joe to name a Randy Newman song and odds are the only one he’ll come up with is “Short People,” the 1977 novelty tune that became a hit single, provoking controversy along the way when listeners took the narrator’s bigotry at face value rather than hearing the song as Newman intended: as a satirical send-up of bigotry.

 

It’s to Newman’s credit that his satire is subtle enough to be mistaken for sincerity; irony falls flat when it is too obvious. And Newman has always been that most ironic of songwriters, making unreliable narrators something of a specialty. Many a Newman song hides as a gorgeous, plaintive love song for the first two verses, before the twist comes in the third verse—think of the slow turn of the screw in “Real Emotional Girl,” in which the narrator starts out waxing sentimental over his girlfriend, only to betray himself as a disgusting cad, or of the character singing “Sail Away,” who at first seems to be promising his intended listeners a future of good and plenty in a gospel-tinged melody, only to be slowly revealed as a slave trader making a sales pitch to unwary Africans. Think also of “In Germany Before the War,” which begins as a seemingly innocent reverie of a peaceful time in the singer’s youth, before spilling a horrific secret he’s been harboring about a capital crime committed long ago.

 

This sophisticated narrative technique is rarely the stuff of popular song, and few could pull it off as well as Newman, whose twisted, satirical dramas are set to music that is pure Americana, influenced variously by Stephen Foster, John Phillip Sousa, ragtime, the music of his childhood home in New Orleans, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, along with a smidgen of Schubert and modern pop and rock when it suits the song. Newman also has enjoyed a long and successful career composing music for film, following in the footsteps of his three well-known film-scoring uncles, Alfred, Lionel, and Emil Newman, and his songs often boast a cinematic quality.

 

Newman, however, isn’t prolific. Since his eponymous debut in 1968, he’s only recorded ten albums of original songs, and only four of those have been released in the past thirty years. More than a decade separated Land of Dreams from 1999’s Bad Love, and his most recent album, Harps and Angels, gestated for a full nine years before being released in August 2008.

 

So in Randy Newman time, Harps and Angels is a relatively new album. And the good news is that it measures up to the best of his work. Indeed, Newman’s oeuvre is marked by a rare consistency that few singer-songwriters can match; perhaps precisely because he resists the temptation to churn out albums on any sort of regular basis (undoubtedly, in part, owing to his successful and presumably lucrative other career as an award-winning composer and songwriter for film, including scores for Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and The Princess and the Frog).

 

From the evidence of the songs on Harps and Angels, time has not mellowed Newman; if anything, it’s merely sharpened his sword. Newman has always been something of a political, or politicized, songwriter—not in the topical sense of a Phil Ochs or a Tom Lehrer, but more in the vein of a sociopolitical critic, along the lines of a Bob Dylan or a prophet (or both).

 

The centerpiece of the album—which takes in a broad sweep of the human condition, to include aging and mortality, family relations, money, racism, and celebrity culture among its concerns—are three songs that address contemporary America. “Laugh and Be Happy” is something of an update of “Sail Away”—instead of addressing the deceptive promise of the American dream to Africans about to be enslaved, it’s a happy-go-lucky invitation to modern-day immigrants to come and lay claim to their “piece of the pie,” to quote the title of one of the other key songs on the album, which lovingly mocks Bono and John Mellencamp for their do-gooder images while hailing Jackson Browne as the only real pop star who has consistently stood for his ideals, without selling out and at the risk of his commercial viability.

 

But it’s in the song “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” written while George W. Bush was still president, that Newman fires his wit with all chambers loaded. The song is exactly what the title states: a defense of the United States at a time when the world was most unhappy with the course that our foreign policy was taking. “I’d like to say a few words in defense of our country,” Newman begins, before laying out the case for Bush and Cheney, without ever using their names, by damning them with the faintest of praise:

 

Now the leaders we have
While they’re the worst that we’ve had
Are hardly the worst
This poor world has seen….

Hitler
Stalin
Men who need no introduction
King Leopold of Belgium, that’s right
Everyone thinks he’s so great
Well he owned The Congo and he tore it up too

 

Newman even takes on the right wing of the U.S. Supreme Court, poking fun at its ethnic and racial makeup in a manner that skirts bigotry—in a way that only the wittiest comedian can pull off without succumbing to charges of racism, because he’s just so damn funny in his execution (and it’s a lot funnier in the hearing, in Newman’s bluesy, froglike diction, than in reading it on the page):

You know it kind of pisses me off
That this Supreme Court is going to outlive me
A couple of young Italian fellas and a brother on the Court now, too
But I defy you, anywhere in the world
To find me two Italians as tight-assed as the two Italians we got
And as for the brother, well
Pluto’s not a planet anymore either.

 

Some might take offense at the singer-songwriter denying Clarence Thomas’s authenticity as a black man because of his conservative rulings, or of the mockery of Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito because they don’t conform to a stereotypical ideal of their Italian brethren. But then again, if no one took offense, then Newman wouldn’t be doing his job. He’s always been an equal-opportunity offender. And if in this case, the narrator is actually Newman himself, and not one of his unreliable “lunatics,” as he has termed them, well then, after forty-plus years, one supposes he’s entitled to sing in his own voice, as long as he continues to compose great music and entertain us along the way. [JAN/FEB 2010]

 

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning editor-in-chief and cultural critic, and the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet. Read more of his cultural commentary at www.berkshireliving.com

 

THE GOODS

Randy Newman
Harps and Angels
Nonesuch Records

 

PHOTO BY PAMELA SPRINGSTEEN/COURTESY NONESUCH