I have an idea for the opening of a movie. It is set in pre-Civil War America. A somewhat scruffy-looking white man is is giving an eloquent, grandiose and highly patriotic speech about the United States. He speaks with great fervor and apparent sincerity about the virtues and great potential of the land of liberty. As he speaks, the camera pans back and it becomes evident that he is delivering his oration to a crowd of people. The camera continues to pan back during his speech, and as his words become increasingly eloquent and heartfelt, the audience sees that he is speaking to a group of dark-skinned people in shackles. By the end of the scene, the audience realizes that he is a slave trader giving a sales pitch to a group of slaves who are about to be sent to the United States.
I wish I could say that this was a completely original idea that popped into my head out of nowhere. But I must acknowledge the inspiration for this idea: Randy Newman's song "Sail Away," a ballad with orchestral accompaniment in which the narrator is a slave trader talking slaves into sailing away to Charleston, South Carolina. The song is particularly affecting because of the contrast between the music, which is quite beautiful, and the subject matter, which is quite disturbing and draws attention to the ugly contradictions in our country's history, where people praised personal liberty while enslaving others.
I also like this song because it demonstrates how Randy Newman is almost a non sequitur in music history. Starting out in the 1960s, he drew his musical inspiration from atypical sources (at least for the time): New Orleans rhythm and blues, bottleneck blues, and movie soundtracks (three of his uncles composed music for Hollywood, and Newman himself would have a successful career composing films scores). He emerged as a cult figure during the era of the confessional (and sometimes narcissistic and self-pitying) singer-songwriter who wrote about their own personal experiences, but Newman specialized in the unreliable narrator. His songs were often short stories that didn’t pitch a particular political viewpoint, unlike the topical singer-songwriters who were in vogue before the confessional ones. Instead, he made the listener think about characters they would normally dismiss as unsympathetic (if they thought about them at all), and sometimes he even imbued these characters with a measure of dignity. For example, the narrator of “Rednecks” is a blatant racist, yet he also makes a valid point about the superior attitude of Northerners who feel that they are better than him despite the pervasive racism in their own cities.
Newman did write “confessional” songs that were apparently about himself, particularly later in his career, but he still wrote as an unreliable narrator. This made it even harder to tell whether he was critiquing the narrator’s attitude or actually believed what he was saying. Indeed, one of the reasons why I like Newman is because his songs force listeners to question their own point of view (which, of course, is one of the reasons why fiction writers use unreliable narrators). Perhaps that is why Newman’s most popular songs, such as his foreign policy commentary in “Political Science” (“We give them money-but are they grateful? / No, they're spiteful and they're hateful / They don't respect us-so let's surprise them / We'll drop the big one and pulverize them“), are generally the straightforwardly humorous songs in which Newman’s real-life attitude is easiest to identify (although sometimes I wonder if Newman might be the type of person who thinks that Dr. Strangelove has a happy ending).