Remembering Randy Newman’s satirical warning about Vladimir Putin
Randy Newman might be best known for his song ‘You’ve Got A Friend in Me’, which was used in the Toy Story franchise, but the musician has had a prolific career as a songwriter, recording artist and film composer since the 1960s.
Known for his distinctive Southern voice and often satirical lyrics, Newman has released 11 solo studio albums since 1968 and 23 soundtracks, including Pleasantville, A Bug’s Life, and Marriage Story.
The musician has been nominated for a whopping 22 Academy Awards, winning for ‘If I Didn’t Have You’ from Monsters, Inc. in 2002 and ‘We Belong Together’ for Toy Story 3 in 2011. He is also the recipient of seven Grammys, and in 2010 he secured a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Although Newman is almost 80, that hasn’t slowed him down in the slightest. In 2017, nine years after his previous solo album, Harps and Angels, Newman released Dark Matter, which was praised as one of the year’s best albums.
Dark Matter contained a re-recorded version of his Emmy award-winning song ‘It’s a Jungle Out There’, which was used as the theme song for the television series Monk. The album tells countless humorous tales. However, one of its most memorable cuts is the track ‘Putin’, which sees Newman sarcastically attack the Russian president.
The song pokes fun at Putin’s efforts to appear macho, with Newman singing, “And when he takes his shirt off/ He drives the ladies crazy/ When he takes his shirt off/ Makes me wanna be a lady.” A chorus of ‘Putin Girls’ chime in to sing, “Putin if you put it/ Will you put it next to me?”
To accompany the scathing lyrics, Newman uses chaotic instrumentation that sounds like the perfect theme for a cartoon villain. The musician explained that he wrote the song when “all those pictures were appearing of him with his shirt off, and I couldn’t understand why. What did he want?”
He continued: “I think it was just personal vanity of some kind, like he wanted to be Tom Cruise. It wasn’t enough to be the richest and most powerful. He wanted to be the most handsome and a superhero, throwing young people around and wrestling.”
Newman claims that he originally wrote a much harsher version but had to tone down the insults. In 2018, the song won the singer his seventh Grammy, this time for the relatively obscure category of Best Arrangement, Instrumentals and Vocals.
Listen to the track below.
