Terça-feira 20 Abr 2010, 1h:37
Randy Newman's Sail Away. Some of these comments are rather underdeveloped, and I may do some additional work on them in the future. The songs deserve better, I think. And maybe I can do better, even if I doubt 1000 characters can do them justice.
Album:
A quick glance at the tracklist makes it hard for me to deny that this is Randy's best album–even if I may love Good Old Boys and Bad Love more deeply. There's no attempt to assay a particular theme through these songs, and you certainly won't find any narrative tissue connecting its individual tracks. The only real constants are a jaundiced eye and withering irony–which are, of course, the constants across Newman's career. Still, there's impressive ambition on display in the sheer range of topics: American history, show business, the psychology of God, death, child rearing, politics, and sex. In other words, the subject here is the whole of human experience and how it appears from a point of view that's carefully attuned to its humor and its horrors (and the humor to be found in its horrors). I think that's about all we can ask from 30 minutes of music.
Track 1, "Sail Away":
Probably the only song about the American Dream that's worth a damn, and an interesting part of Newman's corpus insofar as it combines profound sadness and withering irony, two stains in his work that he tends to keep distinct. The combination makes the irony richer and the sadness … well, sadder. It's proof positive that irony can be something more than a source of humor for those of us in on the joke; I'd rather not be in on this particular joke. This is crushing, almost philosophical irony.
Track 2, "Lonely at the Top":
A burnt-out crooner's plaint with a twist. You'd expect this to be a self-pitying song about the hollowness of The Biz, the emptiness of success, and so forth. But listen to that deep bass sound plodding along in the background, for it gives away the game. The song is a joke–the joke is a cruel, and it's on you. The narrator's not looking for your sympathy, because he holds you in contempt. Your love and adoration do nothing for him, because you're nothing to him. He's telling you his problems to taunt you, to rub your nose in everything he has but doesn't appreciate. He has the fame, the dames, and the dough–but none of it makes him happy. He's practically boasting about his dissatisfaction–it's evidence that he's a deeper, more thoughtful person than you are. He has it all, and it's still not enough to fulfill him. He has everything a sucker like you wants, and he's still not happy. He's miserable, and you can't tell him he doesn't deserve his misery.
Track 3, "He Gives Us All His Love":
Quiet but dramatic, reassuring but sinister, short and self-contained but inscrutable. Should we be comforted that He's all-knowing and all-loving, or should we be terrified that this is what He gives to those He loves? (Maybe "God's Song" is supposed to answer these questions for us later on, but I typically don't expect consistency of that sort from Newman.)
Track 6, "Old Man":
A song sung into the void ("Can you hear me? Can you hear me?"). I appreciate how stripped down this is: towards the end you get orchestra or Randy's piano, but you can't have both at once. The song's burning out and dying, too; it doesn't have the strength to support all those sounds anymore. And Newman's smart enough to know that we actually expresses these sentiments for our own benefit ("I'm just like you," "Everybody dies"), since we only get around to saying these things when it's too late for the person we imagine ourselves to be comforting.
Track 7, Political Science ":
Remember, kiddies, that bully only pushes you around because of his own deep-seated insecurities. Oh, and don't forget to never underestimate the human capacity for cognitive dissonance: "More room for you and more room for me" and "We'll set everybody free" aren't exactly compatible sentiments, but that certainly doesn't mean you won't be finding them occupying the same mental space.
Track 8, "Burn On":
As an erstwhile Ohioan, I just want to say, "Let it burn." OK, I have a few embers of affection still burning for Cleveland; but let the rest of the state–sterile, insular backwater that it is–burn in righteous fire. In any event, concerning the song, I don't know what Randy's aiming for here. I'd like to think that this is a defiant, self-destructive affirmation for a decaying industrial city. Let Cleveland have one last moment of dignity: let it erupt into a luminous, terrifying conflagration instead of experiencing a slow disintegration into desolation and irrelevance. Burn on, big river, burn on and swallow the whole damn world up with you. Is that what Randy's getting at? Probably not–but it's what I hear.
Track 9, "Memo to My Son":
Terrifying. Sure, the melody is sweet and the song ends with a refrain of "I'll always love you"–but everything leading up to that refrain is deranged. Dad rants at his infant son for making a mess, displays some paranoid delusions about his son's contempt for him (apparently assuming his son is capable of mental states that infants just don't have), and, seemingly having lost his track of thought, he spits out a few cliches that seem to have no connection to stuff he was just saying. Finally, he spends a little time fantasizing about the day his son will receive his comeuppance at the hands of dear old dad. So, yeah, this is probably the most accurate portrayal of parenting I've come across in popular music. As I said at the start, it's terrifying.
Track 10, "Dayton, Ohio - 1903":
The album's curio. In the midst of weighty disquisitions on history, religion, politics, stardom, sex, etc., it's a charming, sentimental song about just passing some time in Dayton, Ohio in 1903 ("Would you like to come over for tea / with the missus and me?"). It's a a celebration of quieter, simpler, friendlier times. Sure, there's a touch of self-consciousness ("Let's sing a song of long ago…") and social criticism (through the implicit comparison with the contemporary world) here, but these don't seem to be Randy's primary interests. He's painting a picture of a time and a place, a time and place "when things were green and movin' slow." And the music suggests the feel of such things: it's beautiful and relaxed. Randy's singing even seems less nervous–his voice is quiet and gentle, genially inviting us to share in his sentimental conception of the past and its simpler pleasures.
N.B.: It occurred to me not long after I wrote the comment above that the Wright brothers would have been working on their airplane prototype in Dayton, Ohio in 1903. And it seems unlikely that this is a coincidence. (Why Dayton, Ohio, after all? I've been there, and it's not anything special, I assure you.) So this is a song that celebrates a sort of old-fashioned, slow-moving world that's about to replaced by a more fast-paced world with air travel, etc; and it celebrates the older world in a place that's about to contribute directly to its demise. These underlying facts give the song an extra elegiac dimension, I think: the sense of loss is even more potent when the cause of the loss is right there with us. It's not just the passage of time that's going to destroy this innocent world; it's something happening right here, right now–even if we're oblivious to the change happening right under our noses (the song never draws our attention to these facts).
Track 12, "God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)":
By way of conclusion, we rise all the way up to a God's eye view on the human comedy. The music is stark and simple: Randy's voice is supported by a piano playing a somber sort of death march, and that's it. God's voice in the lyrics is just as direct and unadorned. The lyrics are a sort of backward hymn, with God singing the praises of humankind rather than vice versa. Our signal virtue, He claims, is our capacity for unconditional love. We love God despite the pain and misery and tragedy He's bequeathed to us in this world, and He loves us because we love Him as we do. He sees our suffering; He simply doesn't care very much, as we aren't terribly important to Him. It's not cruelty, but rather indifference and bemusement. He appreciates the humor in our miseries and in our willingness to continue loving Him despite the role He plays in creating and sustaining them. I suppose it's understandable: our gratitude is sweet and all, but it's also more than a little ridiculous.