Underrated Albums: Born Again by Randy Newman

The Reviews
The New Rolling Stone Album Guide: "Born Again went for nasty laughs, peaking with the hysterical 'It's Money that I Love' and the achingly sad 'Ghosts'" (p. 581) (3.5/5 stars)

Allmusic: "Born Again is the weakest non-soundtrack album of Randy Newman's career"
"Born Again was packed full of losers and misfits for whom Newman's contempt was unmistakable. . . . stunningly unsubtle" (2.5/5 stars)

Robert Christgau: "Hence, the content comprises ever more intricate convolutions of bad taste; rather than making you think about homophobes and heavy-metal toughs and me-decade assholes the way he once made you think about rednecks and slave traders and high school belles, he makes you think about how he feels about them. Which just isn't as interesting." (B+)

Musichound - no review - 2.5/5 stars

The Music

Since the above critiques focus almost entirely on the lyrical content of Born Again, I thought it might be interesting to start instead with the music.

To put it briefly, if one completely ignores the lyrics, the music on Born Again is as catchy, varied, and beautiful as any album in Newman's body of work. Balancing rockers like "It's Money That I Love" (the piano line of which Allmusic is good enough to compliment), and the pitch-perfect ELO-ism of "Story of a Rock and Roll Band," with such tender melodic gems as "Pretty Boy," "Ghosts," and "Half a Man," Born Again is a worthy musical successor to 12 Songs and Good Old Boys.

At the same time, the arrangements and production on this album are the best of his career, with the possible exception of Good Old Boys: subtler and less fussy than Trouble in Paradise, Little Criminals, and Bad Love, but fuller and more powerful than 12 Songs and Sail Away.

The Lyrics

So what about those lyrics? Once again, I'm going to look at things a bit backwards by starting with the last song on the album, "Pants." Here are the lyrics in their entirety:

Gonna take off my pants (x4)
And your mama can't stop me (x2)
And the police can't stop me
No one can stop me
Gonna do it right now (x2)
I'm gonna take off my pants
Gonna take off my pants
And your teachers can't stop me
And your priests can't stop me
And your firemen can't stop me
And the President can't stop me
Will you take off my pants? (x2)

de gustibus and all that, but to me this is minimalist humor to rival "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?". Working our way backwards, even Allmusic admits that "'William Brown' is a lovely vignette that wouldn't have been out of place on 12 Songs." Similarly, Rolling Stone agrees that "Ghosts" is "achingly sad." And we can probably ignore "Spies" (not too many secret agents out there to get offended). But that still leaves us with seven songs that fall into the complaint about "nasty laughs" and open "contempt," songs in which Newman takes on transsexuality, greed, love and marriage, corporate employees, metrosexuals, and of course ELO.

First of all, let's all agree that "The Story of a Rock and Roll Band," as hilarious as it is, isn't nasty enough toward ELO. Second, let's remember that the writer of "Rednecks," "Sail Away," and "Short People" clearly likes his humor, like his men, black. What then, is the problem? Rolling Stone's "nasty" and Allmusic's "contempt" are rather unhelpful since they equally describe Newman's other, more widely praised albums. More insightful is Christgau, who says that he had trouble with Born Again because "Newman never pinned down the distance between himself and the creeps he wrote his first-person songs about." This seems to be getting somewhere: "Sail Away" is a clear indictment of slave traders because the narrator is obviously not Newman, but "Half a Man" is more complicated because it isn't clear whether Newman is criticizing the homophobic narrator (presumably a "good" position) or the transgender title character (presumably a "nasty" position).

I would argue, however, that this ambiguity over the distance between Newman and his narrators has been at the heart of practically ever important Newman song before or since Born Again: it is the key to the transgressive power of "I Love LA," for instance, in which this listener, for one, has never been able to decide how much Newman really does love LA and how much he hates the narrator of the song. So too with the whole of Good Old Boys, in which we are encouraged to sympathize with southern racists while still finding their racism distasteful.

But the ambiguity of "I Love LA" is relatively harmless (who cares whether or not he likes the city of Los Angeles?), and the morality of Good Old Boys straightforward (racism is evil, racists maybe not). What makes Born Again different is not a different approach, but different topics. When the wife in "They Just Got Married" dies and the husband remarries for money, it is somehow more shocking than the slave trade because it is so much more ordinary. Is Newman actually in favor of marrying for money? Is he a homophobe? Does he hate Jeff Lynne personally?

Maybe - I don't know Randy Newman. Which is kind of the point. Why do we care so much what Randy Newman the human being (or even the lyricist) thinks about all of this? Primarily, I would argue, because we are uncomfortable with the idea that we might be singing along with, and therefore implicitly supporting, a bigoted or hateful point of view. But our discomfort has always been part of the point for Newman--we're supposed to think about these lyrics, not just assume that we know better than the narrators. In some ways, then, Born Again, because it has so thoroughly resisted easy explicaton, is Newman's most successful lyrical foray. It challenges his listeners to think for themselves more than any other album.

Where does this leave us? We've got some great, well-produced music, tied to complicated, dark lyrics that push us to question our own assumptions and make up our own minds. That sounds like pretty much the definition of a great album to me.