Randy Newman’s Disdain for Everyone or Why Randy Newman is so Great
Randy Newman has had an interesting career. To some, he’s the Toy Story guy who writes the music for all the Pixar movies. Others view him as a great satirist, an accomplished songwriter for other acts in the late 60s/early 70s, and the author as one of the greatest albums ever recorded, Sail Away. If you’re a Laker fan, you might know him as the guy who sang the anthem to the City of Angels that plays every night at Staples (and led way to this weird moment that I and I alone find hysterical for some reason). And if you don’t know him as any of those things, you probably know him as that guy who really hated short people
Unlike most pop songwriters, Newman wrote many of his songs not in his own voice but in that of a character. “Short People” was his biggest hit and, even with the bridge section that spells out the song for those who aren’t the quickest, it was misunderstood as a serious manifesto against the vertically impaired. However, this controversy caused the song to reach levels of success it might not have otherwise. For the first time in his career, Newman, who had before been a musician’s musician up until this point, had commercial expectations. How’d he respond? Born Again. The album cover had Newman in faux Kiss makeup with dollar signs in his eyes. The production on all these songs is a bit glossier, but Randy Newman can only write Randy Newman songs and lightning didn’t strike twice. Newman would head over to film to score Ragtime before releasing Trouble in Paradise.
Trouble in Paradise features the song “My Life is Good”, which features a final verse that requires the context of Newman’s flirting with success to truly appreciate…
The final verse contains these lyrics:
Teacher, let me tell you a little story
Just this morning
My wife and I
Went to this hotel in the hills
That’s right
The Bel-Air Hotel
Where a very good friend of ours
Happens to be staying
And the name of this young man
Is Mr Bruce Springsteen
That’s right, yeah
We talked about this kind of
Woodblock or something..
New guitar we like
And you know what he said to me
I’ll tell you what he said to me
He said, “Rand, I’m tired
How would you like to be the Boss for awhile?”
Well, yeah
Blow, Big Man, blow
The decision to name drop Bruce is an interesting one. And while it might seem like an arbitrary choice of successful artist to name drop, it’s not. Take a look at this clip…
Newman asks how “how the hell am I going to get to know America living here?” It’s clear that the Bruce name drop was more than just naming a famous songwriter and performer. Bruce, more than maybe any other Heartland Rock artist, is known for his reputation as the voice of the American every-man. On a song like “Factory” on Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen sings about the working man on whom his image is based around.
The same kind of worker that Springsteen dedicates entire albums to romanticizing, Randy Newman doesn’t hold them in such high regards. The two could not be more opposites.
Newman paints the working man as a well meaning dolt. The simpleton narrator of “Birmingham” can hardly think of words that rhyme while he sings about working in a factory and being content with never leaving his city, all while declaring it the greatest on Earth.
Another song that seemingly mocks the average man is “Rednecks”. The song has a Southern narrator singing about how he and the entire region have keep the black man (and using some racially insensitive language) down. On first listen, it might sound like Newman is painting a caricature of the stupid, Southern redneck.
But “Rednecks” is a perfect example of what makes Newman so great. Even by this point in his career, Newman knew that audiences were listening for him to sing from the point of view of a character and, in doing so, to make a political statement. But Newman is doing more, he’s singing as a character who is sarcastically singing about how the South is so racist while the North is so tolerant. In the narrator’s eyes, the only difference between the North and South is that the South makes no attempts to hide their bigotry. Newman would later do something similar with “The Great Debate” off the Dark Matter album.
See the only group Newman seems to have more disdain for than the average American is the upper class. “My Life is Good”might be the most clear example of this. Another one was arguably Newman’s biggest non-film related hit, “I Love LA”.
“I Love LA” comes off as a happy celebration of Southern California and on one level it definitely is. Newman said of the song “there‘s some kind of ignorance L.A. has that I’m proud of. The open car and the redhead and the Beach Boys, the night just cooling off after a hot day, you got your arm around somebody.” But that ignorance means that there’s something to be ignorant of, in this case the bum and the poverty and darker side that the city’s less fortunate deal with.
This song more than most in his catalog blurs the line between Newman and the narrator of the song. Whether Newman is in fact the ignorant Californian who only cares about his own life of luxury or a character, it still shows that Newman will take the piss out of anyone, privileged or not.
So while Newman sees being able to connect to the American public and produce hit songs as something he would like to be able to do, he’s accepted that that’s not him. He realizes his song lack that pop sensibility and listen-ability that Bruce Springsteen and the Beach Boys have. He’s flirted with it, but when he has it’s been unexpected and hard to replicate. Randy Newman isn’t for everyone, in fact he’s for no one, but that’s what makes him so damn great.
