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RANDY NEWMAN’S GENIUS FOR POLITICAL IRONY  
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Michael Kazin
November 19, 2024
The New Republic
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_ Few singer-songwriters have such fun getting under listeners’
skin. _

, Randydisney.jpg

 

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Most musicians on the left write
songs that lack a decent sense of humor about serious matters, whether
past or present. Earnest idealists abound: Think of Woody Guthrie
warbling about “Pastures of Plenty” or Pete Seeger musing what he
could do “If I Had a Hammer.” The radical movements of the 1960s
and ’70s did spawn blunt satirists, such as Malvina Reynolds, who
scorned suburbanites who lived in “Little Boxes,” and Phil Ochs,
who spitefully pleaded, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Yet even the
best of such creations, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution
Will Not Be Televised,” are hard to appreciate now with any emotion
save nostalgia. If a revolution ever occurs in the United States, it
will most certainly be seen and heard on billions of screens of every
conceivable size.

 
Randy Newman has been a great exception to this unhappy norm. He has
never explicitly identified with any ideological tendency, preferring
to let his music express his thoughts, he tells Robert Hilburn in the
new biography
[[link removed]],
_A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy
Newman._ But for nearly 60 years, Newman has been churning out wise
and witty lyrics, set to genres from rock to blues to country, about a
stunning variety of topics and individuals, political and historical.
Among them are slavery, empire, racism, nuclear destruction, religion,
patriotism, apartheid, environmental disaster, homophobia, Karl Marx,
George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump, and the
Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. To list them so baldly obscures the
imagination behind his best political songs. In many of them,
characters talk about and for themselves, voicing odious sentiments
that Newman recognizes are vital to making the United States the
intolerable yet alluring mess it has always been. He “inhabits his
characters so completely,” a _New York Times_ critic once wrote
[[link removed]],
“that he makes us uneasy, wondering how much self-identification he
has invested in their creation. His work achieves its power by that
very confusion.”

Take “Political Science,” a novel ditty he wrote during the early
1970s, when demonstrators on multiple continents were raging against
the carnage the United States was perpetrating in Indochina. The song
[[link removed]] takes up the voice of
the U.S. foreign policy establishment. “No one likes us, I don’t
know why, / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try,” sings
Newman with a casualness that quickly segues to a most ghastly of all
solutions: “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.” Think
of the glorious result: “There’ll be no one left to blame us.”
And “every city the whole world round / Will just be another
American town. / Oh, how peaceful it will be, / We’ll set everybody
free.” “Political Science” is a hymn to American exceptionalism
as imagined by a genocidal innocent: After the nuclear holocaust, no
one will be alive except Americans. Well, he would spare Australia:
“Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo / We’ll build an all-American
amusement park there / They got surfing, too.”

Unlike popular songs by leftists that seek to spark outrage or
exultation or urge listeners to get out in the street and march, Randy
Newman’s political music nudges you to reflect on the roots of your
own beliefs and prejudices, and appreciate the power of characters you
despise. “I believe in not hurting anybody,” he has said. That
simple line is a version of the motto of _PM,_ a left-wing daily paper
published in New York City during the 1940s: “We are against people
who push other people around, just for the fun of pushing, whether
they flourish in this country or abroad.” Randy Newman has fun
getting under such people’s skin.

 
 
The irony about this virtuoso of political irony is that his
best-known works are entirely apolitical. Born in 1943, Newman began
his career in the early 1960s writing for such artists as Bobby Darin
and Irma Thomas, as well as recording his own pop and rock songs. But
since the 1970s, Newman has written music for 29 films, including such
animated blockbusters as _Toy Story
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_Monsters, Inc.
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Bug’s Life [[link removed]],_
as well as _The Natural
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drama about an ill-fated baseball star, played by Robert Redford. When
I ask students if they have heard of Newman, most draw a blank. But
nearly all can recite a few lines from “You’ve Got a Friend in
Me,” which he wrote for the first _Toy Story,_ a staple of kids’
cinema since Pixar released it in 1995. He has won two Oscars for his
music and been nominated for many others.

Newman was to the film business born: Three of his uncles wrote
acclaimed scores, and his physician father wanted his son to be a
musician more than he did. Newman shed that reluctance when he
discovered he had a gift for writing songs. Shortly after he graduated
from high school, the Fleetwoods, a pop trio with a brace of No. 1
songs to their credit, recorded his ballad, “They Tell Me It’s
Summer,” in which a teenager laments, “it just can’t be summer /
When I’m not with you.” The banal, if catchy, tune climbed as high
as No. 36 on the Billboard chart.

Over his long career, Newman has written far better, if similarly
painful, songs about longing and depression, covered by the likes of
Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Bonnie Raitt, and Neil Diamond. In
“Guilty,” recorded back in 1974, he captured
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forlorn mood of a man on drugs:

You know, I just can’t stand myself
And it takes a whole lot of medicine
For me to pretend that I’m somebody else

Such songs appear on the same albums as do the overtly political
creations, and Newman would probably object to the idea that there is
a fundamental difference between them. “I’m interested in this
country,” he told one interviewer, “geography, weather, the
people, the way people look, what they eat, what they call things …
maybe American psychology is my big subject.”

n his political songs, however, Newman deploys satire in deft and
original ways to highlight a horrific aspect of the nation’s past.
Perhaps the greatest example
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recorded in 1972. As the strings of an orchestra swell behind him, a
slave trader eager to dispatch people in bondage across “the mighty
ocean into Charleston Bay” speaks to a gathering of unwitting
Africans. His offers them a P.R. pitch for the American dream, laced
with condescending clichés:

In America you get food to eat
Won’t have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It’s great to be an American
…
In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You’re all gonna be an American

Sail away, sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away, sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

So climb aboard that big ship and don’t pay any heed to any chains
you may see laying around. For you will soon be on your way to the
promised land, like those Europeans who came before and will come
after you. The despicable con job underlines a sober truth: To be
proud to “be an American,” one should be able to enjoy “the
fruits of Americanism,” as Malcolm X put it
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“A secret ambivalence of four hundred years” of life in this
country “finds a voice in this song,” wrote
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the critic Greil Marcus. “It is like a vision of heaven superimposed
on hell.”

Newman’s best-known commentary on white supremacy in America was
also his most controversial song. “Rednecks,” the lead track
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Old Boys, _scores white liberals’ hypocrisy about racism. The
song’s protagonist is a white dude from Dixie who freely admits to
“keepin’ the n—s down.” He defends Lester Maddox—the
one-term governor of Georgia and unabashed segregationist who
threatened
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to attack any Black people who tried to eat in his fried chicken
restaurant—as one of his own (“he may be a fool but he’s our
fool”) while sneering at “some smart-ass New York Jew” who
ridiculed Maddox in a TV interview show. Newman’s “redneck”
embraces a slew of stereotypes about uncouth figures like himself:
“We talk real funny down here / We drink too much and we laugh too
loud”; “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.” Up
to this point in the song, one might scoff at the benighted fellow’s
easy acknowledgment of his racism and his other faults, too.

Then the lyric takes a sharp turn away from mocking such not-so-good
old boys. Up North, the redneck points out, white folks claim they
“set the n— free” and call him a “Negro.” But oppression
reigns there too. Black people are “free to be put in a cage / In
Harlem in New York City” and “in the South Side of Chicago / And
the West Side” and in Hough in Cleveland, in East St. Louis, in San
Francisco and in Roxbury in Boston, the song goes on. To accuse
one’s adversary of committing the same sins, without realizing it,
is one of the oldest moves in ideological combat. It should have stung
liberals who didn’t take responsibility for their own share of
injustice. But the song may have been too clever for some. Newman
stopped performing it in public when white audiences in the South
began singing right along to it, n-word and all.

 

 
For Newman, the meaning of Americanism always swings between elegiac
hope and justifiable rage. He loves his countrywomen and men, but
it’s the affection of a brutal realist. In the 2006 song
[[link removed]] Robert Hilburn chose as
the title of his biography, “A Few Words in Defense of Our
Country,” Newman contrasted President George W. Bush’s
misgoverning of the nation with the muddled decency of its citizens:

I’d like to say a few words
In defense of our country
Whose people aren’t bad
Nor are they mean
Now, the leaders we have
While they’re the worst that we’ve had
Are hardly the worst
This poor world has seen

Newman then ticked off the regimes of bloodthirsty tyrants, like King
Leopold of Belgium, whose minions caused the deaths of millions of
Congolese, and the Spanish monarchs who oversaw the Inquisition that
lasted for centuries. He wasn’t apologizing for the debacle of the
invasion of Iraq, motivated by lies, but warning that the United
States could be rushing toward the same fate that befell such once
mighty domains:

The end of an empire is messy at best
And this empire is ending
Like all the rest
Like the Spanish Armada adrift on the sea
We’re adrift in the land of the brave
And the home of the free

_The New York Times_ published
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version of this casual message of terminal decline as an op-ed. Yet,
in cold type and pixels, it fails to capture the power of a satirist
whose laid-back vocals assail the myopia and cruelties of U.S.
history.

Newman always conveys that critique with the affection of an artist
who will never abandon the place that, in another song, he embraces:
“This is my country / These are my people / And I know ’em like
the back of my own hand.” I think Newman would nod in agreement with
the American protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, _Creation
Lake_, an undercover spy in France, who remarks, “I miss being at
home in a culture.… Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive
and creative and precise, like our music and … our passion for
violence, stupidity, and freedom.”

 
 
Hilburn’s biography does not explain how this rather shy fellow from
a well-to-do Jewish family managed to create such provocative music
about a cornucopia of subjects and the characters who embody them. He
dispenses a surfeit of details about Newman’s personal life, but few
bear on the content of his works, political and otherwise. Having
conducted many hours of interviews with his subject, Hilburn can dwell
at length on the highs and lows of Newman’s prolific career and two
marriages. But to learn which of his albums made lots of money and
which flopped or why he split from his first wife but is happily
married to the second reveals almost nothing about what inspired his
songs. Hilburn even fails to make clear why Newman has always sung
with a gentle Southern drawl—although he spent just two infant years
in New Orleans and has long lived in the leafy comfort of West L.A.
The result is a biography seemingly intended for readers who already
adore Newman’s music but might enjoy having a chronological
reference book around as they listen to it.

To his credit, Hilburn reprints all the words to a remarkable Newman
song [[link removed]] from 1999 that fans
of classics like “Sail Away” may have missed. “The Great Nations
of Europe” is something quite rare in popular music: a witty
critique of empire inspired by a book written by a distinguished
historian. In _Ecological Imperialism
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published in 1986, Alfred Crosby argued that adventurers from the Old
World were able to subjugate the inhabitants of the New because they
not just had plenty of “guns for conquest” but, without being
aware of it, also carried in their cargo and bodies “infectious
diseases for decimating indigenous populations.” Newman lifted a few
shocking details from Crosby’s influential book and tied them
together with a catchy chorus:

The great nations of Europe
Had gathered on the shore
They’d conquered what was behind them
And now they wanted more
So they looked to the mighty ocean
And took to the western sea
The great nations of Europe in the sixteenth century
Hide your wives and daughters
Hide the groceries, too
Great nations of Europe coming through
The Grand Canary Islands
First land to which they came
They slaughtered all the canaries
Which gave the land its name
There were natives there called Guanches
Guanches by the score
Bullets, disease, the Portuguese, and they weren’t there anymore

Newman offers no hope for collective liberation in this or any other
song. They could never serve as the soundtrack for a left-wing
gathering as “Solidarity Forever” or “This Land Is Your Land”
once did. But the skeptical humor of his best creations may be more
valuable to the left than the romantic uplift in such radical
standards. Just as Mr. Burns in _The Simpsons
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taught more Americans to ridicule corporate moguls than have reams of
Marxian essays, so “Sail Away” debunks the ideal of American
exceptionalism with a panache no leftist scholar has equaled. “The
common discovery of America,” Norman Mailer once wrote
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“was probably that Americans were the first people on earth to live
for their humor; nothing was so important to Americans as humor.”

Now in his eighties, Newman has not performed in recent years and may
never mount a stage again. But I will never forget the times I saw
this small, froggish man sit down at a piano and drawl out doses of
grim reality that made me grin and think about this land that’s our
land—for better and for worse.

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Michael Kazin [[link removed]]

Michael Kazin’s most recent book is _What It Took to Win: A History
of the Democratic Party._ He is a professor of history at Georgetown
University.

* Randy Newman; Music; Satire;
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