Friday, October 27, 2006

I'M DRUNK RIGHT NOW BABY, BUT I HAVE TO BE/OR I NEVER COULD TELL YOU WHAT YOU MEAN TO ME: A question that was bugging me in the car this morning: Why doesn't Randy Newman's Good Old Boys ever get mentioned in the Greatest Albums Debate? Here's a collection of heartbreaking or moving short-story pop songs filled with Welty-esque misfits ("her papa was a midget/her mama was a whore/her grandad was a newsboy 'til he was 84"), resigned traditionalists (the character who says of Lester Maddox, "he may be a fool but he's our fool"), and up-by-the-bootstraps everymen, packed tight with sad, funny, improbable love stories and bitingly sarcastic commentary on racial, social, and geographic politics, oganized around two genuine goose-pimple moments -- the refrain from "Rednecks" (which I won't recount here for language reasons but which efficiently skewers Northern racial hypocrisy); and the recently-too-on-the-nose chorus from "Louisiana 1927" ("six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline/Louisiana, Louisiana/they're trying to wash us away"). Maybe Newman can't get any respect because his popular reputation is so tied to novelty songs ("Short People"; "I Love LA") and deliberately-commercial Pixar movie themes, and because it takes a little time to appreciate his brand of ambiguity and ambivalence. Nonetheless, Good Old Boys is a brilliant piece of Americana, deserving of a spot in the canon.

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