Randy Newman and Stephen Sondheim, two of this decade's finest songwriter-craftsmen, are both misanthropes intent on subverting the optimism generally associated with American popular music. But until their most recent works, each man took care not to overexpose his nihilism. Newman balanced his despair with humor: if his lyrics mocked religion and homeland, his eloquently sentimentalized Americana often ached for those very ties. He's probably the only pop artist in this country who's given both Aaron Copland and Little Richard their due. Working in a brittle, more refined theatrical style, Sondheim made his own ambivalence his central theme as he refashioned a moribund Broadway tradition
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into talky, neurasthenic art songs. No American composer, save Cole Porter, matches Sondheim in elegance of diction and in metrical and rhyming ingenuity.
Born Again, Newman's seventh LP, and Sweeney Todd, Sondheim's seventh musical, may be these writers' riskiest projects, since each is the vehicle for a flagrant and unusual degree of bitterness. But only Sondheim gets away with such bile.
On Born Again, Randy Newman addresses the Me Decade in a voice that's unremittingly snide. The album's tone is immediately established by a cover photo in which Newman poses as a prosperous young businessman with dollar signs painted, Kiss-style, on his face. "It's Money That I Love," the opening cut, suggests that in these cynical times, the only thing most Americans care about is material gratification. "Used to worry about the poor/But I don't worry anymore," crows a narrator for whom consumption is the best revenge against ordinariness. Unfortunately, this bourgeois Caliban, like most of the people on Born Again, is just a paper tiger on which Newman hangs his contempt. Not once does he stop to suggest any reasons for contemporary grabbiness.
"The Story of a Rock and Roll Band," a galumphing polka, sends up corporate rock by ridiculing the Electric Light Orchestra. Though the production cleverly glosses snippets of ELO's hits, the joke quickly palls. This is the first time Newman has treated rock & roll with unequivocal snootiness.
In the record's cheapest shot, "Mr. Sheep," a Seventies hippie lashes out at a briefcase-toting square. The moral irony is appallingly smug. We're supposed to frown on the hippie and pity the square, but we don't, since both characters are such ciphers that they're impossible to care about.
Born Again's dramatic setups ring as false as its moralism. The almost impenetrable "Pretty Boy" suggests an incipient street fight, but the song ends before the action starts. "Half a Man" pits a trucker against a drag queen, but Newman cops out by turning the encounter into a bad surrealist joke when the trucker mysteriously starts walking and talking "like a fag."
Glimmerings of the classic humorist who gave us Sail Away and Good Old Boys are evident in only two
