Randy Newman

Anyone under 30 (maybe even 40) likely knows Randy Newman as the perennially Oscar-nominated composer of sunny, avuncular tunes for Pixar flicks—a strange fate for one of the ’70s’ most acerbic pop satirists. On albums like 12 Songs and Good Old Boys, Newman burrowed into the psyches of down-home grotesques to skewer American pieties and prejudices from within. On his most recent album, 2008’s Harps And Angels, he jokes uneasily about death and age, acidly imagines the eclipse of American prosperity, and compares Bush/Cheney favorably to Hitler, Stalin, and King Leopold of Belgium. 

Updated 02/09/2011