Deconstructing It’s Money That I Love by Randy Newman
I love Randy Newman. So many of his songs drip with satire and snark. I could talk about dozens of his songs, his attitude on stage, and the sense of ambiguity that his songs use to their advantage. He released his first single in 1962 and put out another great album last year. That official video looks like it was edited by Randy himself on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Because of the vaguery, it’s sometimes hard to figure out what Randy actually thinks. He writes a song about loving LA, and people will be split on whether he’s actually praising or criticizing the city. Much of his work is set in the milliseconds before a punchline drops. But the punchline never comes, its only ever suggested.
It’s Money That I Love is the opener to 1979’s Born Again. The album cover pairs perfectly with the song, as a Kiss-makeup styled Randy Newman sits in a leather back chair under the soft glow of a green accountant lamp. The makeup a fun jab at Kiss’s merchandising strategy, the title and imagery of a lamb next to his assumed children (also wearing dollar sign make up) a jab at Christianity’s relationship to capitalism, and both a jab at himself. This album was the followup to his most successful release at that time, Little Criminals, which had the single Short People, the non-movie score song you may have heard from Randy, if you’re not familiar with him already. This is Randy Newman at a new height of commercial success (though he’d been a critic’s favorite since the 60s), with self awareness and increased verisimilitude.
The actual song is pretty straight forward, a swaggering blues tune that comes out the gate with some wonderfully mild controversial lyrics. Bemoaning nature, God, and family, all classic parts of a traditional America, money is the most important thing in Randy’s life.
I don’t love the mountains
I don’t love the sea
I don’t love Jesus
He never done a thing for me
I ain’t pretty like my sister
Or smart like my dad
Or good like my mamaIt’s money that I love
What’s great about this is that it still could all be honest. None of these things are explicitly over emphasized as being the butt of a joke. People don’t have to love nature, Christ, or their family, there may be bad parts to all of those. But the alternative Randy offers feels especially icky given the reference point created in the first verse. It seems especially slimey to say that, above all, you love money.
Which obviously points out the dichotomy of American culture. We all probably recognize that Americans as a culture, choose to celebrate money more than the things that our media suggest we should. Dan Harmon often talks about how churches used to be the most important buildings in society so they were often also the tallest, but now the tallest buildings are skyscrapers filled with people worshiping the dollar. It’s a metaphor.
Although the song doesn’t use the chord structures presented in the Nahre Sol video below, it’s a good starting point for how simple chord structures can be in blues.
Harmonically, the song sits on a G7 ragtime piano riff for almost the entirety of the verses, keeping pretty sparse instrumentation for the whole song. The chorus keeps hovering around the G but stepping up to the B and the C, before walking the bass line back around to G, keeping plenty of open space for the piano lick to stand out.
Given that the song is satirizing musos like Kiss, who maybe exemplify style over substance, and the relative simplicity of the song, I think a great re-imagining of this song could be in the hair metal style. Although this is still a good decade before we hit peak hair, Randy is pretty prescient on the concept of money ruling culture even pre-Reagan. Check out this cover of the O’Jay’s For the Love of Money with a similar theme done up all pretty in that over the top 80s style. This is basically what I want to do, I even laid down a few drum takes, but couldn’t get what I wanted.
Lyrically, the song continues to lampoon money culture, with the lyric about the 16 year old girl standing out. Now, he edits the line to a 19 year old girl for obvious reasons, but I think that the 16 year old is more poignant. Because that’s the point, to identify the moral incongruence of what people do when they have a lot of money (#notallpeoplewithalotofmoney), and how much power people with a lot of money have.
They say that money
Can’t buy love in this world
But it’ll get you a half-pound of cocaine
And a sixteen-year old girl
And a great big long limousine
On a hot September night
Now that may not be love
But it is all right
The final verse more explicitly identifies problems with wealth. Randy uses “the poor”, “the black man”, and “the starving children of India” (which I had always heard as “the starving children of everywhere”) as examples of people he used to worry about. Now he doesn’t worry about them. As a person with money, it becomes harder to identify with people who do not. I have to remind myself daily that I’m really only ever one misfiring synapse away from being a person living on the street too.
I’m guessing here, but I think that Randy Newman was having a lot of these feelings as his success grew. Growing wealthy in LA as an artist, already in a family of prolific songwriters, it was probably hard to reckon why some mumbling fool deserved so much while others went starving. Luckily, Born Again was kind of a financial flop.
People talk about David Bowie as the master of personas, but I really think Randy Newman needs to be a part of that conversation too. Randy often imitates the worst in himself to create villains, and I think that’s why his satire is so successful.
Also this:
