The Randy Newman song poking fun at nuclear fallout
If there was any artist that could take a joke in their music, it was Randy Newman. For more than five decades, Newman has been one of the most astute and poison-tipped writers in all of popular music. To a certain generation, he’ll always be the guy who wrote ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me’ for Toy Story. But for another generation, Newman is the witty wordsmith who came up with classics like ‘Short People’ and ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’.
Newman was a direct contrast to the singer-songwriter movement of the early 1970s. While other artists were getting confessional in their songs, Newman was desperately trying to sing about anything other than himself. “I don’t interest me. I couldn’t name you any song where I was writing about me,” Newman told Bruce Pollack. “I mean, there’s a whole world of people and there’s no reason why a songwriter should be limited any more than a short story writer or a novelist.”
“A lot of the people I write about are insensitive or a little crazy in a different way than I’m crazy,” Newman explained. “Maybe there’s a part of me in there sometimes in what I’m having this person say, and my attitude is reflected in how I have him say it. But it’s never a situation where I’m living through these twerps I write about.”
Sometimes, the line between irony and reality became too thin for Newman to stand. One of his most hilarious and cutting tracks comes from 1972’s Sail Away: the atom bomb romp ‘Political Science’. With Newman taking a typically laid-back attitude toward nuclear fallout, the singer-songwriter took on the guise of an ignorant American who just wants to lay waste to the rest of the world in order to put in some amusement parks.
“I think I got into a character, this sort of jingoistic type of fellow,” Newman told Performing Songwriter in 2016. “You know, it isn’t the type of song I wanted to write much of. Not that I didn’t love Tom Lehrer, but I don’t want to be, like Don Henley says, ‘What’s this, another novelty song’. And I do write a lot of those, songs that are meant to be funny in a form that listeners take the people in it more seriously than literature.”
Understandably, some listeners didn’t get the joke and assumed that Newman was actually advocating for the eradication of every culture except America (and Australia, as the lyrics comedically point out). “I had it with ‘Political Science’ when someone read this song all about bombing Paris and London and turning Australia into an American amusement park, and wrote: ‘I do hope it’s not serious,'” Newman told NME in 1974. “They actually said that.”
“Do I look like the sort of guy to bomb London, import black slaves to America, tickle people for kicks or think that all that the Chinese do is eat rice all day?” Newman wondered, referring to some of his more satirical tracks. Check out ‘Political Science’ down below.
