But within the context of Newman's broiling psyche this innocuous tune becomes portentious and malevolent. "Birmingham" is similar to the earlier "Dayton, Ohio 1903" and Newman's writing again sounds like Stephen Foster after a prefrontal lobotomy. Like all effective satire the lyrics are rooted in bare hostility and aggression, but the sprightly reeds and horn fills give this angry screed a sardonic ragtime air. "Rednecks" is a staggering song that is also topical: The week the record was released there was a brutal racial incident in Boston over school desegregation. Then the sone moves up North in a savage litany of the names of the black ghettos they're doing a fair job of keeping the niggers down up there too.
#Randy newman good old boys rar tv#
"Rednecks" starts with Lester Maddox and "some smart-ass New York Jew" on a TV talk show, talks about the rednecks keeping the niggers down and about who these rednecks are: Good Old Boys is a bit more crazed than Newman's earlier work. He showed us his adipose little freaks and the commonplace nightmares we all hve in which "everybody scared me, but you scared me the most." Even slavery became absurdity, poignantly comic in his great "Sail Away." In earlier songs Newman presented the Apocalypse (burning rivers and atomic bomb jokes) and somehow you had to laugh. He has made a career out of confusing his audience using dazzling irony and dreadfully warped images as setups for laughs - a new version of the old shadow play of the poor spastic hitting himself in the forehead with an ice-cream cone. After repeated listenings, one impression lingers - Newman is a troubled man. But between flashes of genius and transcendance comes morbidity. The music is fresh - especially Newman's piano. Good Old Boys has a conceptually "Southern" atmosphere it also has drunkenness and depression, fun celebrations of political figures, lunacy, congenital birth defects and obsessional portraits of stereotypes that can leave the listener confused as to whether Newman means what he sings or not. The Ambrose Bierce of rock & roll has released another selection of his bitter and desperately sardonic fantasies.
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