Randy Newman: C or D/S & D

Very far away in a foreign land
Live the yellow woman and the yellow man
He's been around for many a year
They say they were there before we were here
Eatin' rice all day
While the children play You see he believes in the family
Just like you and me
Oh, yellow man, oh, yellow man
We understand, you know we understand
He keeps his money tight in his hand
With his yellow woman he's a yellow man
Got to have a yellow woman
When you're a yellow man

I assume this is satire but it's like z-grade satire imho

i can't believe that 'sail away' shit, slavery is clearly evil

that is a different, much better song

shakey, don't you think the target of the song is idiotic notions of other cultures? i always laugh at the "Got to have a yellow woman/When you're a yellow man" because it's just like the emptiest phrase, like the singer saying, ummm i do not know anything about the yellow man.

yellow man is a dumb song but I lol @ it

I lol @ exactly what tyler posted

[btw, i won't defend yellow man as a particularly great song, it's extremely minor Newman]

btw what do you think of nil sings new, it is one of those albums that's so fucking incredible that I hated it for a while but when I came around to it it can't be fucked w/, it's one of those kinds of albums

that may be the target but I don't like the presentation, which Newman is delivering from a position of power - it's hard for me to shake the impression that he is playing with offensive terms because, as a white guy, he can, as long as he injects it with a suitable level of irony (not sure suitable levels are achieved here, song seems very lazy to me)

I dunno I found this really jarring on the Nilsson record, it bugs me.

xp

it is the worst song on the album yea

shakey have you heard his new song "korean parents"

well, like, relatively new

haw, i was going to mention korean parents.
nillsson sings newman is a fucking masterpiece. like unbelievably good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK-p3mtyhRc

I think you need to listen to a lot more Randy Newman; the song's lyrics make a perfect kind of cosmic sense in the light of a crucial part of his persona - much of what Newman does is meta-commentary on other things, and far more complex than the superficiality of the lyrics might make you think. The song might not as much direct sense now as it did at the time - society has become a little more adept at toning down the abrasive stupidity at racist portrayals. But if you look at the lyrics of Bobby Goldsboro's "Me, Japanese Boy" - which came out just a few years before "Yellow Man" - which gave no hint, (either internally or via the context Goldsboro's persona or other material) of being satiric or ironic - "Yellow Man" makes more sense. It's an extreme minimalist version of "Me, Japanese Boy" - making something that was already really dumb . . . dumb enough that maybe people would finally see it for its stupidity.

Tyler's right on the money. And:

that may be the target but I don't like the presentation, which Newman is delivering from a position of power - it's hard for me to shake the impression that he is playing with offensive terms because, as a white guy, he can, as long as he injects it with a suitable level of irony (not sure suitable levels are achieved here, song seems very lazy to me)

The "power" struggle in "Yellow Man" is really between Randy Newman and racist (white, American) assumptions. And guess who had / has the upper hand? Hint: It's not Newman in a position of power.

lol no I had never heard Korean Parents before now

not sure what to make of it, as I wasn't really aware of Korean parents having a stereotype for being particularly disciplinary or whatever. so whatever stereotype he's trying to skewer there just doesn't register with me

xp

See, those Japanese are almost like us, they experience a human-like love and everything!

ME, JAPANESE BOY

Long, long ago in a land far away
A little boy and a girl were so in love
Standing neath the moon above

He said, "Me Japanese Boy, I love you, I do love you
You Japanese Girl, you love me, please say you do"

They carved their names on an cherry tree
Just like they've done in Japan since time began
Then he gently held her hand

And said, "Me Japaneses Boy, I love you, I do love you
You Japaneses Girl, you love me, please say you do"

In a blue and white kimono
She became his happy bride
From that day until this very moment
She'd been standing by his side

Now they are old and from what I am told
They're still in love just as much as they once were
Every night he kissed her

And said, "Me Japanese Boy, I love you, I do love you"

There is the way that it should be when love is true
There is the way that it should be for me and you

The "power" struggle in "Yellow Man" is really between Randy Newman and racist (white, American) assumptions.

the convenient exclusion of a certain subject here is really lolworthy

ie, don't worry about what any yellow people might think, THEY DON'T MATTER ANYWAY

actually shakey is right, this is a pretty dismal song and almost nothing about it apart from it being sung by randy newman even indicates that it's not just unironic racism (which can't be said for 'sail away,' 'rednecks,' etc). i do love the line 'they say they were there before we were here,' which has kind of a wonderful laconic pointlessness.

yeah not a single line here contains a twist or any kind of reflective "DO YOU SEE" implication - the text in and of itself is just racist bullshit.

dunno, what's the DO YOU SEE moment in Sail Away? is there a backup singer cooing "slavery is bad" that i missed somewhere?

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

but then his gf came over and was like ew you both sound white that was our real do you see moment but I dont know

"Sail Away" is told from the rather clearly spelled out POV of a slave trader (Charleston Bay ref etc), which implies that much of the rest of the lyrics are outright lies. "Yellow Man" contains no such tell-tale detail regarding the narrator.

xp

my friend is korean I guess I forgot that w/e

presumably strict "Korean Parents" must've dropped the ball with him I guess

xp maybe you're right, maybe the reason i've never thought yellow man is racist/offensive is because i know that newman is the guy who wrote sail away and rednecks and is working through some of the same issues. if you removed all context from the song, i don't know what i'd think of it. but has anyone else covered it other than nillsson (on an album called ...sings Newman)?

yeah not a single line here contains a twist or any kind of reflective "DO YOU SEE" implication

this is like, you know how some people see a certain kind of reflection on a song and go 'fucking lit majors'? this is the opposite of that

did you major in namecalling cuz I'm guessing you didn't major in textual analysis

"Yellow Man" contains no such tell-tale detail regarding the narrator.

Who cares? The context of the culture at the time, as well as the rest of the artist's work is all one needs. What you're saying is rather like claiming Jackson Pollock just dripped a lot of paint or Picasso couldn't draw the human form very well. Why should art be spelled out so explicitly? Artists like Harry Nilsson and Ella Fitzgerald understood the song perfectly well!

As far as "Sail Away," it's brilliance isn't that it's a bullshit "sales pitch" made by a liar (though it partially is) - that's taking the narrator thing too seriously and missing other points of the song. Sam Moore (I think it was) of Sam & Dave said that he liked the song because, despite the individual horrors of slavery, life on the whole may have actually been (or turned out) better for those brought over as slaves (or their descendants) than those who remained in Africa. I'd feel uncomfortable making that arguing from my white guy position of power (so to speak), but there you have it. Somewhere on the web there's an analysis of the song's *many* possibilities by Greil Marcus. One of the sub-points in (3) align with Sam Moore's. While "Sail Away" is a better song than "Yellow Man", one could probably come up with multiple interpretations of that song too. But I don't get paid to analyze rock music like Marcus, so you can just take a gander at this instead:

“Sail Away” has already been well appreciated for its complexity of sense, but I don’t know that anyone has been geeky enough to actually list the various senses the song puts into play. To me this seems worth doing in support of a general claim I want to make—against all the wrongheaded prosaic literalists of the world—that piling on possible senses is very natural to us. We get a kick out of it. (Whether I’m being a literalist at another level by specifying the multiple senses is a problem I won’t bother my head about. So here goes:

1. We understand that as the slaver promises Africans they will find happiness in America, he may be gung-ho enough to believe the promise; or

1A. He may believe the promise in a depraved, self-deluding way; or

1B. He doesn’t believe the promise and is simply manipulative.

2. The slaver contradicts himself. “Take care of his home and his family” is a wholly different scenario than being “as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree,” which points up the cruel bind slaves are placed in—denied almost all opportunities to live responsibly but allowed only a miserable version of animal-level happiness.

2A-B (see the options under sense 1): The slaver either realizes this contradiction or doesn’t.

3. In any case, we understand that the slaver’s picture of the American experience is not true (dramatic irony).

3A. Though the slaver’s promise is not truthful about shorter-term outcomes for slaves, the longer-term outcomes could be as promised—“America” might work out great for everyone (further irony added to sense 3).

3AA-B. The slaver does or doesn’t have the foresight to think this, or the will to hope this.

4. Randy Newman, as opposed to the slaver character, is unconsciously channeling the history that came out of American slavery and into American popular music.

4A. Newman is presenting his historical position consciously, inviting us to contemplate the irony of a white singer-songwriter summing up the experience of blacks.

5. Charleston Bay is a beautiful destination.

5A. Charleston Bay is the American equivalent of the Auschwitz train station.

6. “Sail Away” is a viable national anthem—it beautifully brings to a focus our most important national experience, including our strongest regrets and hopes.

6A. “Sail Away” is purely satirical—its value is just that of, say, a Tom Lehrer song.

6B. “Sail Away” is a horror song.

6BA. “Sail Away” is vile exploitation of historical horror.

Let’s look now at the tangle of sense in the greatest line itself, the final line. It starts with “y’all,” which poses a linguistic problem, a cultural problem, and an ethical problem. We have to solve all three problems if we’re to finish processing the senses of the song.

As a linguistic problem, even before we construe the sense of the word we have to decide whether we’re hearing Newman say “y’all” (yawl) or the two words “you’re all” partially slurred together. What rides on this is whether we hear him as a specimen of dialect or as a strategic user of a dialect expression. In the recording and in every performance I’ve heard, he hits the exact midpoint between these articulations; this makes him both a Southerner, a creature of slave society whose sense of what is real and possible is already drastically skewed, and a designer who chose slavery as a means to fulfilling the utopian ideal of “America.” That’s the cultural problem. But even the smart “America” engineer, if it’s him we’re hearing, has to talk in the distinctive language of the South to the extent of using that cozening, coercive second-person plural for the second-person individual. Through this lens we look back on the preceding line, “You’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree,” and realize we could take it as evidence either that the “America” engineer has cleverly geared his appeal to Africans or that the Southerner is already afflicted with racist stupidity. And the cultural problem is totally an ethical problem: how are we to relate to this guy? Should we be afraid of him? Should we stamp him out? Should we pity him?

In 2012, in the hot afternoon of the American Empire, we must hear the offer, or threat, “Y’all gonna be an American,” in its brutality and supreme optimism as applying to Iraqis and Afghans and just about everyone in the world, in principle, except maybe for 11 million Latinos who work inside the United States. Thus:

7. “Y’all gonna be an American!” We mean it!

7A. “Y’all gonna be an American!” We wish we could say it! But we realize we can’t.

7B. “Y’all gonna be an American!” It’s a ridiculous thought, and we renounce it.

I’m claiming we love to pile on extra layers of sense in our expressions, but I must admit it’s equally characteristic of us to boil sense down to a simple takeaway, especially when we can use it as a weapon or an Open Sesame. The possibility of oversimplification is especially worrying in the present context. What if I go forth beaming upon the peoples of the world my new all-purpose conviction, “Y’all gonna be an American” (sense 7)? Randy Newman’s song is so outrageous that this can’t happen. Surely.

guys guys come on now we're all english majors here. with a minor in being chill.

is the marcus thing an expansion of the thing in one of his first books?

in which -- lit major alert!! -- he compares the narrator to melville's Confidence Man

Tyler, lots of people have covered it. Ella Fitzgerald (as mention) did a studio version I haven't heard, but I did hear a live version that was not only fabulous, but also (somehow) conveys the sense of absurdity of racist images (expressed in something like "Me, Japanese Boy.)

I like Mo's opinions a lot, but I think they're wrong here. For me, it's the simple matter of agreeing with Newman, Nilsson and Fitzgerald - three of America's greatest 20th century musical talents.

Fuck me, that appears to be not by Greil Marcus, but by Steve Smith. My apologies:

http://hooksanalysis.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/the-greatest-line-randy-newman-sail-away-1972/

I already said Sail Away was a better song, one with subtleties and nuances not found in Yellow Man, which is simply clumsy.

A work requiring a lot of external cultural context - particularly the kind which cannot be extrapolated from the work itself and is not referenced in the work itself - to be appreciated is a bad piece of work.

xp

might be worth noting that on 12 songs it immediately follows the 1932 'underneath the harlem moon':

Creole babies walk along with rhythm in their thighs,
Rhythm in their feet and in their lips and in their eyes.
Where do high-browns find the kind of love that satisfies?
Underneath the Harlem moon.

There's no fields of cotton, pickin' cotton is taboo;
They don't live in cabins like old folks used to do:
Their cabin is a penthouse up on Lenox Avenue,
Underneath the Harlem moon.

They just live on dancing,
They're never blue or forlorn.
'Tain't no sin to laugh and grin,
That's why darkies were born.

They shout “Hallelujah!” ev'ry time they're feeling low,
Ev'ry sheik is dressed up like a jawja gigolo;
You may call it madness but they call it "hi de ho,"
Underneath the Harlem moon.

A work requiring a lot of external cultural context - particularly the kind which cannot be extrapolated from the work itself and is not referenced in the work itself - to be appreciated is a bad piece of work.

what is this i don't even

I mean Pollock and Picasso - these things function on a visceral level (color! shapes! everyone understands these things to varying degrees) outside of their cultural contexts.

xp

shakey you should probably assume, given that Newman is always completely bullseye when his subject is race relations, that you are missing the point. how often is Newman not singing through a personified narrator? how reliably is it the case that if he's saying something stupid, you're to understand that he is singing through the voice of a person he considers stupid, usually to mock that person? it's so clear in "Yellow Man" that it's just weird that you don't get. "Yellow man, oh yellow man/We understand, you know we understand" - you actually hear that as Randy Newman singing in earnest? He's making fun of condescending exoticism by embodying it at a very reductive level.

now what follows 'yellow man' is 'my old kentucky home', shakey i recommend that one to you, it very clearly positions itself so you realise the narrator is dislikable, there is v little room for ambiguity

(there's also something going on in that little triptych vis-a-vis the flatness, clumsiness of yellow man's couplets set against the trick rhymes in 'harlem moon'; his performance of that song has more to it than 'hey, check out how racist this old song is'; but argh it's friday night)

"Yellow Man", lyrically and musically, does not really contain any references or contextual clues beyond it's baldfaced racism. that is all that is there, a bunch of stereotypical, crude descriptions of Asian people. It doesn't situate these lines within a broader context the way the lyrics of "Sail Away" explicitly do. If the insistence is that one has to know Randy Newman's catalog and a bunch of biographical details about Randy Newman and the time and place in which he wrote the song in order to appreciate it - well, those are the marks of a shitty song. Good songs do not require such externalities in order to work.

xp

you don't really need any externalities to hear that the narrator of "Yellow Man" is a moron

you actually hear that as Randy Newman singing in earnest?

where did I suggest this?

He's making fun of condescending exoticism by embodying it at a very reductive level.

and he's doing it in a terrible way - the simple hamfisted replication of racist language - which is his exclusive privelege as a white guy

sad you guys are defending this. this is like "white guy proves how bad blackface is by performing in blackface" level clumsiness imo.

hang on, still trying to make an 'externalities' gag

you don't really need any externalities to hear that the narrator of "Yellow Man" is a moron

if the listener themselves are racist morons, there's nothing in the song to make them uncomfortable with their moronity, which is a problem imho

where did I suggest this?

you didn't suggest it, you said it outright:

wtf is this "Yellow Man" bullshit. can anyone defend these lyrics? This is like "Kung Fu Fighting" level idiocy.