Randy Newman: C or D/S & D

It's simple and crude and entirely indistinguishable from genuine racism.

it's simple & crude & Shakey Mo is incapable of distinguishing it from genuine racism, is a true statement.

"They say they were there before we were here" - if you don't hear the author behind the narrator there, you are a very lazy reader

"You see, he believes in the family, just like you and me" - ditto

"we understand, you know we understand" - ditto

"got to have a yellow woman when you're a yellow man" - the most hideous line in the song, anyone who doesn't cringe isn't listening or is racist. which is the point of the line.

YouTube commenter claims that this song is used to advertise the Simpsons in Sweden

context is extra tricky when you're dealing with a) racism and b) from a position of entitled power, especially so in the case of the latter. If you hand me two bucktoothed, slant-eyed, yellow-skinned caricatures of Chinese people, which are indistinguishable from each other in form and content, and tell you one is racist and one is not... um

xp

tell ME one is

argh

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v18/Estimatedprophet/KellyNewDawn_jpg.jpg

they are distinguishable by most readers. you can't make the distinction. you're also not listening to anybody's explanation, but gainsaying it immediately. there is no point. cling to your wrong opinion, you aren't interested in actually understanding the song.

lol for a LONG time I was like "I do not fucking get it" with those Onion cartoons

If you hand me two bucktoothed, slant-eyed, yellow-skinned caricatures of Chinese people,

except you're not being handed a caricature of Chinese people

you're being handed a caricature of a narrator

you don't understand that, you think the narrator has to say I AM A NARRATOR or it's racism, but that's just your own weird trip

aero I appreciate you goin in on the line readings but yeah I think those lines are pretty weak as signifiers of greater depth - Newman works this angle better elsewhere, it's like his approach is insufficiently developed here. the patronizing undertone in the lines you cite isn't overt enough imho, they're too close to actual patronizing racist lines.

xp

I'm not claiming it's his masterpiece, it's an early song - B effort from him at best. But that it's clearly, obviously, to almost anyone, a caricature of a stance - that is obvious. Without extratextual clues.

you think the narrator has to say I AM A NARRATOR or it's racism

that's ... sort of true. racism is tricky like that.

and again, retract the blackface claim - he's not saying "We are Siamese." The narrator is white, speaking about an Other, not through an Other's voice. You are wrong to compare that to blackface.

xp lol you really severely do not get it

if Randy Newman had sang Kung Fu Fighting would you guys be defending it as satire?

"Kung Fu Fighting" is not reductionist and does not refer or act as meta-commentary on anything from around the same time in the same way "Yellow Man" does, so it's a dumb question. Essentially, Randy Newman never would have written it - it's not like anything he's ever done. "Kung Fu Fighting" was a hit because it played upon the early to mid-70s craze for kung fu movies in urban black neighborhoods. Plus it was sing-songy and catchy as hell - great performance and a good groove, with a fab hook. Carl Douglas (performer of "Kung Fu Fighting") was not, nor has ever been, known for anything else much, and he certainly had no persona that would have provided the context necessary to see it any other way.

Mo, I've got to be believe that if you were much of a Randy Newman fan you would have heard this song long ago. Randy Newman's never been the big seller that one might expect from his acclaim and long career, in part that's because context is generally needed to see all the facets of his work. It's a bit like "Seinfeld" - low ratings at first, because taken on their own (that is to say, without knowing the characters and actors and without having seen other episodes), "Seinfeld" does not seem very funny. It's only when the viewer - through repetition and variations of themes - understands the patterns that the show comes alive. (If you like it, that is!) So I think if you spent more time with Newman and don't hold onto this grudge, the song will began to appeal in a different way. It's worth it, in my opinion.

Steven Fucking Tyler's last few comments take a different tack, but get it exactly right, Mo. I don't think you're trying, you're avoiding reasonable explanations and making silly and inaccurate comparisons (re: the Chinese caricatures and "Kung Fu Fighting") and not really understanding the implicit idea that there is a narrator there . . . just like there is in nearly every other song.

"Kung Fu Fighting" does not refer or act as meta-commentary on anything from around the same time

hahaha this is a joke right

that's ... sort of true. racism is tricky like that.

Again, to you. "Yellow Man" was on the first Randy Newman album I ever had, and I didn't know a thing about him at all. I still got it. Deeper knowledge and further listenings through the years certainly *add* context. But while racism might be "tricky" for you, it doesn't appear to be as tricky for some of the rest of us.

The narrator is white, speaking about an Other, not through an Other's voice.

wait isn't the Other in this case the racist lol

my only point about the blackface thing was that it's dangerous for white people to attempt to appropriate racist imagery with the intention of showing how racist it is. if it isn't done deftly and with a lot of care, it risks just being another reproduction of racist imagery. which is essentially what happened in Yellow Man.

also I hate Seinfeld fwiw

Shakey, I bear you no ill will so I'm going to try again. Literally every line of "Yellow Man" is a clichéd white description of the exoticized other. Kung Fu Fighting, on the other hand, is actually trying to describe then-trendy kung fu movies, and while the language is indeed racist, it's not textbook you've-actually-heard-people-say-this racism like "very far away in a foreign land live a yellow woman and the yellow man." note that this first line situates our narrator and goes out of its way to use the definite article "the" to point out to you, the gentle reader, that an entire race is being reduced to a single person. "Kung Fu Fighting" does not, in fact, have any similar authorial signposts. I consider this explanation pretty clear, but I will also bet five dollars that your opinion is "no way, they're exactly the same."

it's not textbook you've-actually-heard-people-say-this racism

apart from the generic term "Chinaman" ... but in the interest of earning $5 I will concede this is a good point

gotta go now btw

thx for the insights (honest)

i think marcus says something in 'mystery train' about how newman was reluctant to play this song live. kinda understandable, tho it doesn't necessarily reflect on the song's meaning -- i think 'rednecks' is one of the all-time triumphs of newman's songwriting and a total masterpiece in every way, but i'm not putting it on any party playlists.

if you're still in SF I will straight give you five bones next time I'm out there, a bet's a bet!!

Hating "Seinfeld" should not obliterate an understanding of how it works best with external context. I don't like it much either. So what's your point?

I don't even think "Kung Fu Fighting" is racist, to be honest. In fact, the only thing I think anyone could take any offense at is the term "Chinaman," which wasn't intended to cause offense . . . just a little dated (though less so in 1974) and insensitive. But other than that, the song was simply a celebration of kung fu movies . . . and not, as people like to read it, meta-commentary on Chinese people. Unless you're an idiot. But why should art be dumbed down so that idiots don't misunderstand it? (I'm not referring to you, Mo.)

wish there were a randy newman song sung from the POV of someone who doesn't like seinfeld.

Now I can't get the image of Shakey (whom I've never met, so can't actually imagine) making a pinched Seinfeld face and saying, "Newman," through clenched teeth.

they say that it's funny
yes, that's what they say
so i sit down and i watch it
day after day...

me and a friend did a cover of yellow man when we were stoned and I listened to it a week later and we had like 10 vocal tracks recorded on top of one another and all of them had really heavy reverb or w/e and I was like what the hell were we thinking

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, August 10, 2012 10:37 PM (Yesterday)

hahahaha this is fantastic

I only heard the song "Yellow Man" of Harry Nilsson's NILSSON SINGS NEWMAN, which as mentioned is so shickoingly gorgeous I think I can be excused for never paying attention to the words and somehow thinking it was a moving ode to a full mooon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9sJEXhCDc8

you are actually criticizing Randy Newman for getting his tone too perfect

btw I think this is essentially true fwiw and is probably the most illuminating thing I took away from this. to be fair, it doesn't really make me like the song any more - some imperfections in the tone or more overt peek-behind-the-curtains sort of lines would have improved it imho

don't feel bad Shakes, a lot of people out there think that Newman really does love L.A., you even hear the song at Clippers games IIRC

well that's the thing about "i love l.a." of course randy loves the city. it's where he's lived most of his life, and where he has chosen to stay. and of course he sees a lot here to make fun of. his genuine affection for the city he's making fun of is a big part of the soul of that song. (and he's really making gentle fun, at best.)

Shakey being a hueg Tarantino fan adds to the comedy here.

Randy could live anywhere but lives near Hollywood, doesn't he? He does love LA.

oh, xp

exactly, you just can't take it at face value (I guess it's a bad comp because I Love L.A. has at least SOME truth to it, but c'mon, this is Randy Newman)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvLeQbwuKys

At last we get to see the comments Rednecks and Short People would have provoked if YouTube had existed in the 70s. The Toy Story guy is racist WTF???

ugh

Flooding ALL & ONLY White countries with non-Whites and telling everyone to "assimilate" to create a "brown future" is White genocide.

Africa will still be full of Africans.

Asia will still be full of Asians.

Only White children will suffer from this.

Read the UN genocide conventions: It is genocide plain and simple!

Anti-racist is a codeword for anti-White.

Kevin Culver 13 minutes ago

dorian that's your fault i read that

Oh is that the one at the top now? Sorry.

HOW ABOUT IM DREAMING OF FALSE JEW KHAZAR *SYNAGOGUEOF SATAN (REVELATION 2:9) . HAHA :)`
666ASTANA 4 hours ago

"Political Science" is CLASSIC. I'd never listened to Randy Newman but the local record store had "Sail Away" and "Good Old Boys" for a dollar each and i have been rocking them for the past week or so. Great stuff, so effing sarcastic.

Gotta say the first song I listened to was "Rednecks" and I was LOLling the entire time.

"college boys from LSU/went in dumb/came out dumb too"

Don't know our ass from a hole in the ground

GOB and SA are on endless repeat at my house this fall. I don't think I've heard a classic record like these that contained so many beautiful songs in a long time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBux4AlGQzM

I mean sweet Jesus, this is some beautiful music.

I've seem him live a few times, and each time I've been amazed by his remarkable economy. For all the words in his songs, there often really aren't that many words. He just makes them all count. "Sail Away," for example, is just three brief verses, and a couple of simple choruses, but the song conveys so much.

sail away's practically an epic!!

Josh otm. He's really the anti-Elvis Costello.