Randy Newman

by Ben Greenman

Randy Newman is best known for his satirical character studies. You’ve heard them, of course: “Rednecks,” “My Life is Good,” “Political Science.” They’re portraits of deluded narrators who cling desperately to an outmoded or unpleasant or immoral idea: racism or narcissism or jingoism. Those songs succeed by illustrating how people rationalize their own monstrosity. These are the Randy Newman songs that get the most ink, because they demand the highest level of critical intervention.

And people just love to intervene in those songs. Many years ago, in college, I took a class on vernacular American humor, and I wrote a paper on “Rednecks,” and specifically about how the song shifts in the middle from the redneck perspective (“Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show / With some smart-ass New York Jew”) to a broader social critique that implicates that redneck perspective (Newman lists all the urban ghettos in which African-Americans are “free to be put in a cage”). The teacher was a grad student who had long hair and glasses and cited Lyotard in casual conversation. I don’t remember a tremendous amount about the class, but I do know that it seemed at times labored, if well-intentioned, and that it cured me of thinking too much about Newman’s comic mechanism. As much as I enjoy his most Mephistophelean rhetorical moves (it’s difficult to overestimate the pleasure of a surgical strike like “I Just Want You To Hurt Like I Do,” in which Newman lays bare one of the most basic of human needs), I leave it to others to compare him with Twain and Stephen Foster and Melville’s Confidence Man. I leave it to others to speculate on what it meant for Newman, in 1970, to sing the explicitly racist “Underneath the Harlem Moon” (which posits a sentimental brand of racism, but racism nonetheless) or, for that matter, to release “Yellow Man” during the Vietnam War. I leave it to others to investigate how these songs do or don’t dovetail with Newman’s own (rare) exploration of his own ethnic identity, which is treated most explicitly on the Land of Dreams album. What I’ll do, instead, is list a few reasons I’m thankful for Newman and his talent. I’m thankful that he loves a wide variety of American music, blues and jazz and ragtime and gospel and country. I’m thankful for the way he fuses melodic sophistication and lyrical intelligence, and for the fact that many of his songs are standards in their time thanks to the interpretations of brilliant singers like Dusty Springfield, Harry Nilsson, and Tim O’Brien. I’m thankful that he can be, within the span of a few songs, viciously sarcastic and unapologetically sentimental. And finally, I’m thankful that despite his erudition and eclecticism, he remains a disciple of one of the two or three most beautiful things in rock and roll, the Fats Domino triplet. I picked three songs that span the range of his talent: the epically insecure "Maybe I'm Doing It Wrong," in which he admits that he's not getting the most out of sex (the best line, "sometimes I throw off a good one," also works as a description of songwriting); the driving "Gone Dead Train" (representative in that it's from a soundtrack, unrepresentative in that it'll blow the doors off your car or home); and the lovely "Rollin'" (probably his most beautiful song, though it’s hard to vote against “Louisiana 1927” or “Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield” or even “Sail Away,” which is like the Hope Diamond of cynicism).

I have interviewed him a few times, and his songwriting style translates perfectly to conversation: bookish, laconic, careful with big thoughts and quick with one-liners. He’s been self-deprecating and also slyly dismissive of Bono, and it’s hard to argue with either of those stances. One of the things he said the first time I spoke with him has stuck with me over the years: he said that no one really gets better as they get older, but that if your work stays at the same level, more or less, that’s a victory. I think he’s right, and right about himself: even though his last album, Harps and Angels, was at times too clangorous for me and at other times too theatrical, there are still instantly canonical songs like “Only a Girl,” a little confection about a May-December romance that ends with a thud as the narrator realizes that his girlfriend might love him for his money. What Newman is in that song, and what he’s always been to me, is a
light. Sometimes it’s a winking light. Sometimes it’s a cold light. Sometimes it’s a sad light at the dying of the day. But everything he makes has candlepower. Not that there's anything wrong with your Loudon Wainwrights and your Lyle Lovetts and your Christine Lavins and your John Prines and your Stephin Merritts and your Eminems. But humor in music—not simply comedy, but humor, the kind that cuts deep and saves the blood that comes out of the wound—has only one shamash.

Download:

"Maybe I'm Doing It Wrong" mp3
by Randy Newman, 1972.
available on Sail Away

"Gone Dead Train" mp3
by Randy Newman, 1970.
available on Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman

"Rollin'" mp3
by Randy Newman, 1974.
available on Good Old Boys


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This is the first of eight posts at the Boogie Woogie Flu, in which eight Jewish writers will discuss the works of other Jewish artists for eight consecutive days in celebration of Hanukkah.

The Rootless Cosmopolites

by David Gordon

I first discovered Leonard Cohen in the garbage. I was dumpster diving with some friends in San Francisco, and we found (along with a Nakamichi tape deck I still have) a CD player that was jammed shut. We popped it open with a knife, and The Best of Leonard Cohen was inside. Since it was the only CD we had, we played it over and over. Then I went out and bought everything I could find with his name on it. No doubt I registered that Cohen was a Jewish name – is there a name more Jewish? – but at the time other things intrigued me more: the poetry, the pain, the grown up sex and wisdom. It was adult entertainment, in every sense of those words.

I became a Serge Gainsbourg fan later, after hearing “Bonnie and Clyde,” becoming utterly haunted by it, and realizing he was the same guy who sang those smart, sleazy, slick songs “Je t’aime…moi non plus” and “69 année érotique.” His legend fascinated me too: the louche ladies’ man always looking as though he’d been up all night at the orgy while secretly producing great art. Later I had a girlfriend in Paris who was obsessed with Serge, his grave, the graffiti-covered house. Recommending other singers I thought she’d like, I suggested Cohen. Why? The similar, gravelly voices. The talk-singing. The witty, dark, perverse lyrics. And, I suddenly realized, both were Jews, Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European descent, a concept that barely made sense to a Japanese Parisian girl who barely knew any Jews besides me. My other suggestion, the CD I made her in NY, only confirmed this hunch: Lou Reed, another lone voice in another wilderness, a Jewish boy from Long Island who’d gone off the reservation into a life of crime, drugs, sex and art. Did every culture have one of these underground Jews? And did someone who loved one love them all?

When my current girlfriend told me on our first date that Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground were her favorites, I knew she was not only beautiful but a woman of rare taste for her generation, and I also realized, without a moment’s hesitation, what else to play for her: Cohen and Gainsbourg, of course, (and of course she loved them, and me for playing them) as well as that other Jewish star: Randy Newman, the strangest creature of all…A Jew with a Southern accent!

In the end, as with so many things, it all leads back to Dylan.

I never registered that Bob Dylan was Jewish until he got born again. As a profoundly secular, atheistic Jew living in the Jewish heartland of NY/NJ, I never gave Mr. Zimmerman’s ethnic or religious background a second thought, since, in my mind, it couldn’t have anything to do with his genius: by definition, nothing that reminded me of middle-class Jewish-American life could be of any interest.

Then he became a Christian, which was much worse. It seemed, frankly, ridiculous. (Although the show I saw during this period was terrific.) It made me realize that the best thing about being a smart, urban Jew was that we didn’t take it all so seriously. It also led me to think about how very Jewish his music had actually always been. There are the myriad Biblical references, too numerous to tally here, with the Old Testament far out-weighing the New. There is the voice itself, closer in some ways to a high, wailing cantor than to Elvis. Just like the other (sort-of) singing, wandering Jews, who are his secret brethren.

There are many other characteristics this group shares: They are intellectual, poetic, high-minded yet low-down, wicked and a little sleazy, portrayed sometimes as sexually depraved or ambiguous and morally or politically suspect. Their singing skills are, let’s say, unconventional, yet their voices became famous. They are seen as prophetic commentators, doom callers with obsessive fans, and as leaders and originators of forms, yet they remain always apart, more like each other than their supposed peers in folk, rock, punk, whatever. Eventually adopted as national or cultural heroes by their home-states, they nevertheless remain uneasy figureheads, critical and in a way forever foreign. They even, as they age, seem to look alike: the sharp noses, the slashed lines around the mouth, the deep-set eyes, open foreheads and thick kinky hair. They look…well they look kind of like some of my relatives…and it suddenly becomes possible to imagine that these guys, Midwesterner, Long Islander, Louisianian, Frenchman, Canadian, all have ancestors from the same shtetl in Russia, or a territory once conquered by Russia.

Weirdly, this profile is almost exactly in keeping with one of the classic anti-Semite stereotypes: the rootless cosmopolitan, the wanderer, the hustler, the intellectual, anti-patriotic, amoral seducer of Christian girls and boys, who insinuates himself into the culture, infecting it with his subversive ideas, his degenerate songs and decadent art, but nevertheless remaining eternally alien.

It turns out that they were right to be afraid, for the little sneaky Jews have triumphed. It is, I would argue, a counter-lineage, a line of Jewish development just as noble as, if less frequently acknowledged than, the rabbinical one, and among its great figures I would include Philip Roth, Larry David, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Walter Benjamin, Kafka and Freud. The dirty-minded, dark-hearted, deep-souled and golden-voiced Jewboys, who carried their weird little light all over this dark globe. I’m proud to be their humble descendant. Happy Hanukkah and YWHW bless us all!

Download:

"Tower of Song" mp3
by Leonard Cohen, 1988
available on I'm Your Man

"God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)" mp3
by Randy Newman, 1972.
available on Sail Away

"I'm Set Free (Closet Mix)" mp3
by The Velvet Underground, 1969.
available on Peel Slowly and See

"Ring Them Bells" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1988.
available on Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8

"Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus" mp3
by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin
available on Jane Birkin et Serge Gainsbourg

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David Gordon's first novel, The Serialist, will be published by Simon & Schuster in March 2010.