Featured Musician: Randy Newman

     After Kirk Douglas' filibuster, Randy Newman's acceptance speech for Best Original Song was my own personal highlight of Sunday night's Oscar show, though I'm more than willing to admit that my immense respect for the man and his work likely skewed my perception of the moment. That Newman is now commonly associated either with DreamWorks soundtracks or the imbecile assaults by Family Guy is a point of minor tragedy for me, given that his compositions from the 70s and 80s produced some of America's richest, most exacting social satire.
     Newman's style mixed deadpan, straight-faced delivery with unflinching confrontation of taboo subjects. "Political Science," for a start, is a casual rumination on the merits of destroying the world through nuclear war, a prospect that in 1974, the year of the song's release, rested somewhat prominently on the average listener's mind. "Burn On" sings the praises of the Cuyahoga River, which in 1969 famously caught fire through abject pollution and burned for three days, the song constructing the event as if were some kind of magic, delightful occurrence.  
     Not content merely to address controversy from a distance, Newman's lyrics often inhabit the very disreputable characters that give rise to taboo. The wince-inducing "Sail Away" takes the perspective of an Atlantic slave trader convincing African tribesmen, under flagrantly false pretense, to come to America. "Rednecks," more painful still, explodes from the mouths of self-identified bigots, the song's lyrics throwing to the four winds racist and anti-Semitic slurs, one after the other.
     "Rednecks" serves as the opening track to Good Old Boys, Newman's acclaimed album from 1972. The album is one-half smear campaign on conservative prejudice, the other half a sympathetic homage to the marginalized, blue-collar Caucasian whose own sense of oppression all-too-often gives rise to the very bigotry that the other half of the record attacks.
     "Louisiana 1927," hearkening from the latter category, is my runaway favorite, not only on the album but in the whole of Newman's library. Short, simple, and outrageously beautiful, the song addresses the devastating Mississippi Flood of 1927 that left 700,000 people homeless, and further articulates the Southern paranoia that the North was either somehow responsible for the event or, at best, bluntly unconcerned.
     At the tear-jerking climax of the ballad, "President Coolidge come down in a railroad train," and remarks, with cynical dispassion, and bigotry of his own, "Ain't it a shame/What the river has done/To this poor cracker's land."
     Swap out "Coolidge" for "Bush" and "railroad train" for "big jet plane" and the song serves perfectly as an anthem for Katrina, a case-in-point for Stevie Wonder's remark that any great protest song will always be relevant. 
     For ensnaring the pains of a nation and its people, Randy Newman is a man I'm proud to salute.