On September 2, 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, killing 1,800 people and displacing tens of thousands more, the great American icon Aaron Neville and R&B star India.Arie They appeared together at a televised benefit concert and sang a wistful ballad with an anguished chorus:
“Louisiana, Louisiana
They are trying to wash us away.
“They are trying to wash us away.”
The performance was visceral and devastating. “Louisiana 1927”, a classic album Good Old Boys (1974) Randy Newmancould have been written at any time in the last hundred years. With Hurricane Katrina, history repeated itself. In the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, poor people, black and white, bore the brunt of a weather event so catastrophic that flood waters covered more than 40,000 square miles, with a height of up to 30 feet. In Newman’s imagination, the president Calvin Coolidge He observes the scene and says without emotion to a subordinate: “Isn’t it a shame what the river has done to this poor boy’s land?” Or put another way, at a later date: “Brownie, you’re doing a great job.” It’s a perfect American song.
Newman occupies a peculiar space in American life. He’s not a household name, strictly speaking, but he’s probably familiar to almost every household thanks to his eclectic collection of hits, familiar tunes and movie soundtracks. Chances are you’ve come across “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” (I am your faithful friend) of Toy Storyor his satirical and comedic hits “Short People” and “I Love LA.” There are many other entry points.
Are you a baseball fan? Start the climactic scene of “El Natural” and watch Robert Redford running the bases as the wavering majesty of Newman’s score hints at glory while acknowledging epic failure as a real possibility. Do you love the seedier edges of ’70s rock? Think of the insinuating success of Three Dog Night “Mama Told Me Not to Come.” That’s also a song Randy Newman. His multitudes contain multitudes.
In his immersive and fascinating biography of Newman, A Few Words in Defense of Our Country (A couple of words in defense of our country), the acclaimed music critic and biographer Robert Hilburn seeks to place Newman in the canon of the rock era. He sometimes struggles to do so, largely because Newman’s music has always seemed to avoid rock and roll altogether. In fact, he once said that he liked to pretend that Rolling Stones They never existed. Nephew of the legendary Oscar-winning composer Alfred Newmanwho was responsible for the soundtracks of dozens of films, including City Lights of Charlie Chaplin y The seventh year itch of Billy Wilderhe found the music business relatively easy in terms of access and skill.
His first release, Randy Newman (1968), was full of sophisticated songs that would soon be covered by figures such as Bette Midler y Dusty Springfield. It was orchestral and idiosyncratic. Coming out of his shell, the brilliant Newman proceeded to write one of the enduring trilogies of American music: 12 Songs (1970), Sail Away (1972) y Good Old Boys (1974). Profoundly strange and subversive, even by the standards of the messy music industry of the time, Newman’s records refracted the brilliance of prewar composers like George e Ira Gershwin y Rodgers y Hart through the neuroses of having grown up in the nuclear age.
In essence Newman is an ironistso it makes almost geometric sense that his six-decade career can essentially be divided between his years as an acid-tongued recording artist and those as an acclaimed soundtrack composer. He’s been nominated for 22 Oscars and has won exactly two, which feels like the punchline to a song of his own (upon winning for the first time, he thanked the academy for the opportunity to be publicly humiliated so many times). “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” is irresistible to anyone who’s ever had a heart. He is also one of the all-time greats. With its infectious, upbeat New Orleans beat and friendly chorus, who could resist? He helped Pixar become a giant.
The lack of understanding of Newman’s music is a persistent theme in what is – largely – a hagiography by Hilburn, who sometimes leans too comfortably on the received wisdom of classical critics and devout fandom. Just because Newman intended that It’s Money That Matters (1988) was a joke, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t also increasingly true for the artist himself. At the height of his film work, he had amassed Croesus-like wealth, in some respects the logical end of a generational fallacy: at one point in the book, Newman is quoted making an offhand joke to a journalist about having to “ to stay here in this luxurious hotel suite and worry about the poor.”
Priorities everywhere begin to blur. As for loving Los Angeles, despite the ironic distance, surely this is a man who does. More than any other composer apart from Leonard CohenNewman understood and anticipated the slide toward consumerism driven by Ronald Reagan – the endless corruption and useless excess, the ten-car garages and the $10 trillion deficits – and decided that not agreeing with it was no excuse for not enjoying it.
Yet Newman never abandoned America or its ideals, and never fully resolved his competing anxieties about them. “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” the 2008 song that provides Hilburn with its title, was such an incendiary repudiation of US foreign policy George W. Bush that he New York Times reprinted his lyrics as an opinion piece. The basic premise was that although the United States was behaving badly at the time, it was not yet the worst country in history. After all, Newman wrote, there were the Caesars, King Leopold, and the Spanish Inquisition. Never doubt American ingenuity, the subtext seemed to say. Give it time. Just give us time.
Fuente: The Washington Post
