It's one of those scenes that make you smile and melancholy at the same time, a bit like when you listen to some of his songs for the first time and you're not sure what to feel. Randy Newman hit the stage at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles for the premiere of Toy Story 5 and sang You've Got a Friend in Me with Taylor Swift. He didn't get there on his own two feet, man and piano were slid motionless yet self-propelled from the back of the stage. He seemed perhaps unable to make certain movements, aged beyond his 82 years. After those three minutes I asked myself: will people know who Randy Newman is? Do you know his records or just his soundtracks?
Newman is the forgotten giant of American song. There was a time, which lasted perhaps 10, maximum 15 years between the 70s and 80s, in which he was loved and hated, revered and criticized. It has often been misunderstood. Not because he wrote using bold images, indecipherable constructions or a difficult language, but because he sang using the voices of others including racists, mean people, illusion pushers. He wrote songs that knocked you down and others that made you smile, he recorded funny tunes and epic pieces, he was sarcastic and sincere, clever and tender. By singing like this, he sang America.
Who knows what his fellow citizens, perhaps the only ones in the world to have access to that record, thought when he released his debut album in 1968 Randy Newman. Popular music was seething with ideas after the summer of love and this Californian, nephew of great film composers who had lived for a certain period in New Orleans, a biographical detail that counts in his music, this Californian I was saying appeared on the cover with a hard look, thick-rimmed glasses, the promise of a music that was not exactly young at a time when being young was everything.
He was not a counterculture rock prophet or even a confessional singer-songwriter. He wrote songs looking at stories from a point of view that others didn't consider, he knew how to conquer but also make people uncomfortable with a few words and piano notes. As in Davy the Fat Boy about a fat, marginalized child. Did he redeem it in the song? No, before dying his parents entrust him to a character, the narrator, who transforms him into a freak. In other words: keep your confessions and your very important feelings, here is an author who is tied to the traditions of Broadway and the Brill Building, of film music, of songs in which it is permissible to interpret the good guys and the bad guys and everything in between.
The point is that Newman rarely puts himself into his songs, even though he did that too. More typically, he rents them out to people he considers more interesting than himself, for better or worse. No voice is reliable, all must be listened to. Even that of the protagonist of Sail Awaya piece that moves you until you realize it's sung from the point of view of a human trafficker. We are on one of the ships that bring slaves from the coasts of Africa to America, indefinite time, and he sings over that music that makes you swoon that “in America you have to eat, you don't have to run in the jungle and scratch your feet, you just need to sing about Jesus and drink wine all day, it's fantastic to be American”. And then he invites the slaves to sail with him, as if they had the possibility to choose. He doesn't need to make proclamations like today's very busy artist-activists, he just needs to write from the “wrong” point of view to tear apart the rhetoric of the American dream with a poetic force that no rhyming or rhyming slogan can have.
There are not only such songs in the repertoire of this giant, and in fact in the same album as Sail Away there was You Can Leave Your Hat On then brought to success by Joe Cocker and in that of Davy the Fat Boy there was I Think It's Going to Rain Today which has been remade by everyone, from Judy Collins to Peter Gabriel via Barbra Streisand and Nina Simone. Newman sang about the feelings and did so so sparely that he shattered the rhetoric of the love song, but he never stopped portraying a beloved but always reformable America.
Perhaps in this sense the masterpiece is the 1974 album Good Old Boysthe story of the South of the United States that passes through the sincerely moved tone of Louisiana 1927on the great flood that took over half a million people from their homes that year, to the joyfully sarcastic one of Rednecks where he talks about both the racism of those who live in those places and the prejudices of the people of the North. And yes, he has another “wrong” narrator sing it who admits that “we're too stupid to make it in a northern town,” but that at least “we know how to keep niggers in their place.” Obviously it pissed everyone off.
Perhaps the most well-known and sensational short circuit is the one caused by Short Peoplewhich opens Little Criminalsthe follow-up album to Good Old Boys. Here too the satire is so well interpreted that it seems like a literal stance. “Short people have no reason to live, they have little hands and little eyes, and they walk around telling big lies,” sings Newman in a song that drew boycotts and insults. It was on the same album In Germany Before the War which begins with a story told in the third person plural, but ends in the first singular: the narrator is a pedophile who kills his victims, the one we met is a little girl who was lost, with golden hair and gray eyes.
The beauty of these songs also lies in their ambiguity. Even when they tell terrible stories they are strangely poetic. The doubt remains that in some cases the singer takes pleasure in putting himself in the shoes of his “bad guys”, but ultimately he first entertains us and then uses our disapproval to make us see something of the world. He doesn't seem interested in clarifying things, an unthinkable fact in this era in which everything must be clear and unassailable. He is rather interested in understanding what happens when a song collides with the public's sensibilities. Listen Old Man: the protagonist is on the deathbed of an elderly man (his father?) and instead of comforting him the bastard tells him that “there will be no God to console you, you taught me not to believe that lie”, and then invites him not to cry because everyone dies sooner or later.
If great songs have emerged from this way of writing, it is because Newman is first and foremost a musician capable of bringing together the refinement of 70s Californian songwriting with the jazzy taste of New Orleans. While his colleagues made music for the belly or, I apologize, for the heart, some of his songs dragged on in an indolent and sometimes deliberately uncertain way, like a listless person who drags his feet in the morning as soon as he wakes up. If New Orleans is his dream land, one Land of Dreams as per the title of one of his albums, Hollywood is the land of imagination and money, where his talent as a music composer found a safe and happy haven even when his songs struggled to find a large audience. It's all a meeting of black and white roots, rhythm & blues and American orchestral tradition. They are songs where sometimes tiny characters move within arrangements that don't seem to deserve.
As the years went by and fashions changed, Newman's music was pushed to the margins and to tell the truth it became heavy, it lost liveliness, the singing became almost tired, the publications were sporadic, the last album of unreleased songs Dark Matter is from 2017. However, he hasn't stopped singing America in his own way like in the Charleston of 2008 Laugh and Be Happy. The narrator addresses a group of immigrants and invites them to smile and be happy, not to care about those bastards (white Americans and 18 years later us too, definitely) because “if you believe in dreams, they will end up coming true”. When you think that telling this story is an asshole worthy of the slaver of Sail Awaycomes the reversal of meaning: “You must smile and be happy, laugh in their faces because very soon you will take their place”. You listen and sit there thinking if it's a good thing or not. They are stories that still speak to us and it is only one aspect of his repertoire which has a dozen albums of songs to explore starting more or less from the mid-70s, many soundtracks and a parallel dimension in which he gave voice and singing to toys and cars. Everything is held together perhaps because, as Lucio Corsi says, in addition to being a great musician and author, Newman has the candor and nastiness typical of children.
Years ago he published a sort of editorial in music called A Few Words in Defense of Our Countrya rather unusual fact for someone like him. It seems he wrote it after a European tour and having realized the negative idea that we all have of America (and it was 2006 and there was no Trump). It is at the same time a defense and a criticism of his country and therefore implies an invitation not to divide every damn thing in a Manichean way. Randy Newman made us love nuances, he made us understand that there is good in what we consider evil and that there is evil in our beloved good. It made us think like bastards, it made us understand that sometimes we are the bastards. His most controversial songs do not ask for membership or even dissent. They ask for the time necessary to listen to even the wrong voices. And it is in that time that something great happens.
