Whenever I mention Randy Newman to my very short friend (I actually have several very short friends—they make me feel better about myself), she says, “Who?” “The guy who wrote ‘Short People’.” “Oh yeah…I hate that guy.” Randy Newman made her life miserable, as he did millions of short people all over the world, when he composed that satirical masterpiece. Like all of Newman’s songs, the voice of the thing he pokes fun at—in “Short People” it’s the ludicrous logic of prejudice —is so compelling, so friendly, you ended up singing along, in its own voice!
Imagine you're at a baseball game, singing along with George W. Bush to a song he wrote about how swell the death penalty is, and how we’re doing God’s will by executing mentally-challenged people.
Randy Newman can make people do that.
Which is exactly what happened to my very short friend throughout her last three years of elementary school: in the cafeteria, on the playground, on the bus, her fellow students sang along with that absurd voice, “Short people got no reason to liiiiive…”
Randy Newman showed me that the voices I love hearing most are the dark ones—the losers, the liars, the silver-tongued devils who aren’t fooling anyone, even themselves. His ragtime, Americana style piano playing is the perfect delivery system. Like Huey Long’s boppy campaign song, “Every Man A King" (which Newman covered), it sounds guileless, but it's utter bologna. It sells lemonade. It’s our history—the same history that gave us the Massacre at Wounded Knee and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. The pitiful voices inside the sound are our cultural inheritance: slave traders (“Sail Away”), trigger-happy imperialists (“Political Science: Drop the Big One”), child murderers (“In Germany Before the War”), racists (“Rednecks” for which, the story goes, Newman wrote the line, “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground” to keep rednecks from chanting the song at sporting events), pedophiles (“Shame”), and the dregs of the dregs (“Baltimore,” ad infinitum).
But my favorite Newman move is self-indictment. My mouth waters just thinking about it. Mmm! Oh, the cares we lose when we open our mouths and sing, “I am a total shithead, everyone. Best stand clear lest I totally f*k up your life, too.”
An interviewer once asked Newman if he thought that his folksy ragtime style was the most effective way to convey his subversive message. His response was something like, “Many have said, ‘No—it’s not at all. It’s absolutely the wrong way go about it.’ But I’ve put a lot of time into it. I’m probably not going to be switching it up. Not this late in the game.”
