https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/
~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
Ever since he leapt out of a window on Tin Pan Alley in 1968, Randy Newman has outsmarted the world to such an extent that he has inadvertently imposed his own obscurity. His anthem on the insanity of prejudice ended up enraging people so much that he received extremely prejudiced death threats. Tom Jones scored a huge hit covering his floundering track on meek sexual ineptitude by making it about macho sexual prowess, and he cataclysmically claimed that all his fans are “ugly” in the disastrous antithesis of Richard Ashcroft’s successful marketing quip that he’s “never had a bad review off a good-looking person.”
Indeed, Newman has, almost by design, made himself hard to market. How can someone be the Dean of Satire and the Master of Children’s Music? It’s a confusing dichotomy, one of many in the stumpy six-foot maestro and master of simplicity’s existence that continues to beguile as he enters his 80th year. It has ensured that over the years, he has garnered a consistent fanbase of 200,000 globally. That isn’t many for a musical genius, and he’s smart enough to see why but just not quite smart enough to help himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
But he is a genius all the same. The lyric, “If Marx were living today, he’d be rolling around in his grave,” is genius. Responding to a letter about a fan who committed suicide while listening to a loop of the song ‘Laughing Boy’, by saying, ‘Thank you, great compliment’ is genius (dark, but genius). Crafting tracks that can enchant children with wonder and offer up affirmation for that same child 20 years later is also genius (light, but genius).
He is living proof of the predicament foisted by culture still in the grips of religiosity, that art can actually be a laughing matter. For too long, solemnity has ruled the airways, and the only thing met with reverence or deemed important is in a league of art that can now be aptly described as Oscar-bait. So far, he’s got the kids on board and with that, we can be hopeful his ranks will rise from the 200,000 mark to infinity and beyond because he is a wonderful gist who brightens our dismal daily lives with a wry cognisant wink towards what blights them in the first place. This is what the world needs now, and it always has been: a singing frog who lovingly disparages everything… and then quickly renders that appraisal ridicules with something as gorgeously sincere as ‘She Chose Me’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
These little stories, borne from the imperfection of life, exude such comedy and heart that you can rejoice in tragedy if only for the poetry it provides. Each song has its message and tale to tell, from dramas about lacklustre lovers to satirical skewers of colonialism, and as a songwriter, Newman allows them to tell it without any prejudice or preordained notion of what a masterpiece should be, so they veer and wax to the whims of his novelistic ways. But not all the stories in this unreliable narrators songbook were created equally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
So, with that in mind, we’ve waded through the chronicles of Newman and come out with his finest tracks; a nearly impossible task, but if he teaches us anything, it is that life is arbitrary and capricious if you take things at face value all the time; but if you see this list as a highlights reel celebrating a master, then rather than a brutal culling of classics, the words of Steve Tesich might spring to mind: “Life, it seems, is not meaningless but, rather, so full of meaning that its meaning must be constantly murdered for the sake of cohesion and comprehension. For the sake of the storyline.” When it comes to Newman, there is always meaning lingering beyond the last note, sometimes he just outsmarts it out of existence.
No comments:
Post a Comment