‘Brothers’: Randy Newman’s comical insight into the Kennedys
Back in 1965, Bob Dylan sang, “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked”. The line was startling and true in equal measure. Of course, there’s no reason why it should be shocking – it simply states the obvious – but in those days, authority figures were so revered and respected that to consider them as merely human was tantamount to sacrilege. Randy Newman mulled over this point some years later in 2017, proving the point that we still struggle to get our heads around the fact that we’re all one and the same.
One case in point regarding our struggles to comprehend this can be found in the many conspiracy theories that followed the assassination of President John F Kennedy. By and large, these baseless musings are tethered to one intangible mental hurdle: a peasant cannot kill the king. The leader of the free world being slain by a lone wolf with a gun is a scary thought—it runs us too close to reconciling the classic Kurt Vonnegut quote: “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
Thankfully, with ‘Brothers’, Newman looked at the lighter side of this, comically tapping into a universal truth very rarely acknowledged: the Kennedy family were also just that, a family. They might have been powerful beyond any normal measure, but they still no doubt bickered over who ate the last biscuit barked the cruellest insults imaginable at each other… and then tried to quell the impending nuclear apocalypse.
“What interested me about the song is that they’re brothers, irrespective of who they are. I like the dynamic of an older brother poking fun at the enthusiasms of the younger brother,” Newman told Pitchfork. “I didn’t know I was interested in the period itself, but when I think of it now, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a time when you were looking up every time a plane went by – for a few days there, it was scary.”
He, unfortunately, adds, “Like it hasn’t been since.”
Now, imagine being a mere human like you and I and having that to deal with as your day job. It’s stressful enough when Angela from accounts throws a passive-aggressive curveball your way, but to try and save the world while your IBS is playing up and you want to catch the Monday night football later that evening is another beast entirely.
The reason Newman’s track is so simultaneously terrifying and comical is the juxtaposition of daft but deeply human whims and the gargantuan consequences they’re married to. As he explains, “I liked how trivial the reasons were to support the Bay of Pigs and that the guy wants to save Celia Cruz. Because the US has done some invading of small countries for not much more than that.”
As the Dean of Satire, Newman weaves together a darkly comic tale that dredges up yet another classic Vonnegut quote: “That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.” Those mistakes, whether you’re in government or not, are underpinned by our relationships—relationships like a pair of brothers churlishly debating the virtues of saving Celia Cruz, the singer who Fidel Castro prohibited from returning to her Cuban homeland.
As Newman tragically says, wars have been fought over less.
