SHTICK IN THE MUD
After five albums and almost ten years of intermittent brilliance, Randy Newman achieves a number one single with a nastily amusing ditty.
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RANDY NEWMAN Born Again (Warner Bros.)
After five albums and almost ten years of , intermittent brilliance, Randy Newman achieves a number one single with a nastily amusing ditty. He proceeds to sing the tune on a weekend network, television show and give his critics what we used to call in my neighborhood a Bronx cheer. Thus giving rise to they Shavian fnaxim, �Rock satire is what closes on Saturday Night Live.� Creative tastelessness is abrasive and provocative; jokey crudity as shtick is usually just irritating. Little �Criminals is the weakest of Newman�s first half-dozen albums, but doesn�t cross that line. Almost all of Born Again infuriates, the way Roth�s Our Gang does, or Altman�s A Wedding, or a particularly unfunny evening on Sat. Nt. Live. It�s the slapdash work of an artist who, for the moment, seems determined to justify all the' attacks his detractors have flung at him. Does anything fall as flat as shallow satire? Newman�s greatest stuff—most of 12 Songs and Good Ol� Boys, parts of Sail Away (the title track) and his debut (�Davy The Fat Boy�)— drew, and deserved, comparisons to Robert Johnson, William Faulkner, Lorenz Hart, Stephen Foster, Thornton Wilder, and Fats Domino. Born Again makes all the praise sound giddy, and it wasn�t.
The idea is this: that a return to basic American/Judeo-Christian values, the current mood that
prompts such newsweekly queries as �Where Have All the Heroes Gone,� also means a return to materialism, paranoia, racism, homophilia, general mindlessness and insensitivity. As usual, the Newman lead-off track (like �Sail Away,� �Redpecks,� �Short People�) tips the hand. In the voice of a smug businessman, Newman insists, �Used to worry about the poor/ But I don�t worry anymore/.../It�s money that I love.� It�s a post-activist hedonism, a half-popnd of coke and jail-bait in an air-conditioned limo, and a theme so right for Newman it�s startling to hear how he botches it throughout the album. �It�s Money That I Love� �s concerse; �Mr. Sheep� may be the most obnoxious song Newman�s ever sung, not because he�s any stranger to societal offense, but because it�s unredeemed by wit, narrative distance, insidious melody or arrangement. It�s pure bile. One could go on and on citing similar failures: the baiting of a �Pretty Boy� who looks like, �that dancing wop�; the confrontation between a �big old queen� and a trucker; �Pants,� a dumb parody of dumb
rock rebellion.
Born Again�s better songs ,'are songs he�s written before. �Ghosts,� just Newman, his voice and piantf, is a first-person lament of a trapped old man �scared to go out� to where the colored kids are playing; �William Brown,� more a sketch than a full-fledged song, follows a tobacco man from North Carolina to Omaha/ with intriguingly slight data; and there�s Newman�s refreshing off-handedness in the lyric to �The Girls In My Life (Part I)�: �Met a girl at the bakery/She wanted to borrow my car from me/ She took it down to Mexico/Ran over a man named Juan.� _ \ k,
But a take-off on the Electric Light Orchestra, �The Story of a Rock and Roll Band,� complete with a maddeningly catchy tune and clever Lynne-isms, is more indicative of Newman�s bizarre tactics. The objects of his musical scorn don�t seem worthy of the effort expended to puncture them. If you have to invent a �history� of ELO to make them sound silly, what�s the joke? Or, in �They Just Got Married,� is there something intrinsically hilarious about getting married, becoming a nursery school teacher, dying? Newman�s �Love Story� had a matter-of-factness that makes it durable; this 79 variation substitutes condescension for irony and, for all its reliance on �detail� (�He gets a job working in a car wash up id Santa Cruz�), it�s considerably less vivid.
Whatever is good about Born Again—and there are some things, starting with the cover—is obliterated by the insufferably snotty way in which Newman ends the LP by singing �Will yooouuu take off my pants?� Put aside the employing of the flamboyantly, ungifted Waddy Wachtel on guitar, the reliance-on synthesizer rather than the glorious movie-music orchestra of Sail Away and Good OF Boys, other minor musical infractions (like Stephen Bishop). This whine is the vocal equivalent of that graceless TV raspberry, and Randy Newman should not be a buffoon.
Mitch Cohen
