Randy Newman: C or D/S & D

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.

something about disease amongst chinese coal miners just to bring it full circle. also, 30 rock did a bit with jon hamm in blackface a few months ago, it was pretty funny.

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.

That's just silly. The vast majority of art - particularly in visual and musical forms - is understood largely through context, not explicative narration. Context motivates most art. If you think of the dadaists or impressionists or beatniks or punks or (whatever), context was almost everything. The reason that most of the important movements in art, music, literature (etc) take a while to catch on is because most people aren't very adept at contextualization and generally need to wait until they've been inundated with context before they can even attempt to make a judgment about it or appropriate it. That's why the Swell Maps sold essentially no records in America, but now have their music used in Big Three car commercials on television. Or how, when people dress up for era-themed parties (50's, 60's, 70's, whatever), they all end up wesaring clothes that 99% of the population would never have gone near. (Look at a yearbook from a San Francisco high school in 1968, and you'll be disturbed how many people look like Donna Reed and Pat Boone . . . not Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin.)

Part of the brilliance of Randy Newman is that the meaning of even some of his slighter songs (including his biggest hit, "Short People") are misunderstood / comprehended in perplexing proportion.

Mo, your initial understanding - posted here - wasn't "This isn't a particularly good song. It's clumsy and subpar." it was:

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

I can respect anyone not liking the song. But you still missed the point. Don't blame the narrator; a lot of people got it. Including Harry and Ella and me.

[i]you didn't suggest it, you said it outright:[/]

lol waht

BANJO!

my initial post doesn't say anything about the narrator! you guys are trying to hang some weird, much easier-to-dismiss position on me.

that Hamm thing was really touchy, if Tracy Jordan hadn't been in that scene it would not have worked at all

I'm not going to argue w/you about it though you don't get it & you're in Shakey Is Angry mode you're not going to hear anything & you'll come up with all kinds of nonsense to defend your position. The song is clearly satire. What's making you uncomfortable in it is that the ugliness of petty exoticization is so clear in this song that it's painful to hear. generally speaking, exoticization isn't what a satirist targets - it's something huge like slavery, where you can't miss the point. the target here is the small daily racism of white hegemony. it is successfully and clearly embodied and is horrible to hear. the idea that as a satirist Newman has to wink at you or he's failed is an idea you can really only hold if satire isn't yr deal.

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

(also the comparison to blackface is offensive tbh and I would earnestly ask you to retract it? the mask Newman's wearing is that of a white racist. that does not, in any way, compare to blackface.)

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

personally i think ppl itt should retract their harmful, reductive views of blackface

like I get that you guys want to defend this song because it's all butthurt Randy Newman fans time but this song is lacking in its construction. Not everything the guy wrote was a tour de force satire of race relations. It's simple and crude and entirely indistinguishable from genuine racism.

xp

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

congratulations on posing a genuinely meaningless question - hard to pull off!

a lot of this argument basically comes down to 'we know this is not racist because randy newman wrote it,' which i am really not comfortable with. i don't doubt that newman set out to write a satire of exoticism but the actual song he produced is underwritten and completely lacking in nuance.

songs are pretty similar imho

except one is funky I guess

xp

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

Morons are going to be morons. And why is it Randy Newman's task to ensure all listeners are educated? He's not Joan fucking Baez!

What you're saying isn't any different from saying that the Ramones should be condemned because the narrator never makes it explicit that sniffing glue and beating on brats is wrong. Nor does it make them "uncomfortable with their moronity" - I don't see much difference here, really. (And I could make the point for hundreds of artists who *also* rely on external context for the listener to "get" their songs.)

You don't like the song - which is fine - but you don't seem to acknowledge that some people did get it right away.

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