Randy Newman’s ‘Born Again’ Is His Best Critique of Toxic Masculinity

In 1977, Randy Newman had the biggest hit song of his career, “Short People”, which, somewhat incredibly, made it to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. It attracted a fair amount of controversy from people who didn’t realize that the narrator’s vicious but absurd insults to little people – “They got grubby little fingers / And dirty little minds / They’re gonna get you every time” – were satirical. It was also, I think, widely misunderstood by a certain sort of smug liberal who took the song’s anti-bigotry bridge—sung, hilariously, by the Eagles—at face value: “Short people are just the same as you, and I / All men are brothers until the day they die.”

Newman’s song even turns on the self-satisfied listener who imagines she understands it. The narrator quickly agrees with the Eagles that he’s a fool and that the world is a band of brothers—only to immediately return to his bigotry. The real joke is not on the bigot, loathsome and ridiculous as he may be. It’s on people who think bigotry can be eliminated through platitudes.