Composition
Whereas most of his songwriting contemporaries wrote confessional songs, Newman chose a different path, writing first-person character sketches instead. And on this album some of those characters include low-lifes, losers, racists, and drunks. These picaresques were often used by Newman to satirize conventional song lyrics. For instance, on this album he deconstructed the conventions of the love song on tracks like "Have You Seen My Baby?," "Suzanne," and "Lucinda." Some of the targets of Newman's satire on this album (which he would return to on future albums) include racism ("Yellow Man"), L.A.'s rock scene ("Mama Told Me Not to Come"), and the South ("Old Kentucky Home"). The songs on the album cover a wide range of styles, including rock 'n roll, R&B, folk, jazz, blues and country.date=September 2012}}
Q perceived "an idiosyncratic niche" by Newman "rooted in biting satire and traditional pop structures." Allmusic's Mark Deming commented that "Newman's humor started getting more acidic with 12 Songs, but here even his most mordant character studies boast a recognizable humanity, which often make his subjects both pitiable and all the more loathsome." Robert Christgau wrote that "As a rule, American songwriting is banal, prolix, and virtually solipsistic when it wants to be honest, merely banal when it doesn't", but found Newman's "truisms—always concise, never confessional—" to be "his own." He assessed the album's music in a retrospective review, stating:
Speaking through recognizable American grotesques, he comments here on the generation gap (doomed), incendiary violence (fucked up but sexy), male and female (he identifies with the males, most of whom are losers and weirdos), racism (he's against it, but he knows its seductive power), and alienation (he's for it). Newman's music counterposes his indolent drawl—the voice of a Jewish kid from L.A. who grew up on Fats Domino—against an array of instrumental settings that on this record range from rock to bottleneck to various shades of jazz. And because his lyrics abjure metaphor and his music recalls commonplaces without repeating them, he can get away with the kind of calculated effects that destroy more straightforward meaning-mongers.Read more about this topic: 12 Songs (Randy Newman album)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Give a scientist a problem and he will probably provide a solution; historians and sociologists, by contrast, can offer only opinions. Ask a dozen chemists the composition of an organic compound such as methane, and within a short time all twelve will have come up with the same solution of CH4. Ask, however, a dozen economists or sociologists to provide policies to reduce unemployment or the level of crime and twelve widely differing opinions are likely to be offered.”
—Derek Gjertsen, British scientist, author. Science and Philosophy: Past and Present, ch. 3, Penguin (1989)
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)