does randy newman love LA?

a close reading

Landing in Los Angeles after a quarter century spent nowhere but the badlands of the American Northeast, I found myself at a certain sociological advantage. Being in LA but not of LA I quickly saw myself become a receptacle for people’s powerfully sore feelings about my new city. When you live in LA, people feel compelled, obligated by sworn tribute to some dark organ at their middle, forced, to tell you that they hate LA. Often, those people live here, too, but have built an entire personality around being from, usually, New Jersey and thinking it’s the greatest place on Earth even though they inexplicably do not wish to move back. Less frequently, it is the Chicago suburbs. And God help us all if its anywhere in spitting distance to Boston. The hatred—insisted upon with an urgency usually reserved for children stamping their feet in good shoes, having got overtired fighting with cousins unattended at a party running too long and rather drunk—is almost incapacitating, and many people convince themselves of it without ever having set a foot in the city. I find it amazing. I find myself perversely obsessed. Back home for Christmas for the first time in 2018, I ran into a guy in a bar who I knew when I knew guys in bars back home. Another life already. Peachy-blonde hair damp from snow and a Celtics zip-up jacket not warm enough for the December night. We chatted at the pleasant, freeing remove which one can with a person they used to know well and will not know again. Parting, he smiled to show a chipped tooth I found sweet and said, “Hey, fuck LA.”

The “why” behind this loathing is not the interesting bit to me. There are those consumed by sports rivalries. Sure, fine. Some people are racist and some think “the media” is trying to control them via bad and expensive films and others are so misanthropic they feel oppressed by the sun, the latter of which I can empathize with. Many individuals have bought entirely into some Fox News-born, social media-bred phantasmagoric vision of Los Angeles as a hedonist graveyard of good American values and now they’re scared of the big bad city, just as they are of any place not in a quarter mile radius from their parents’ upper middle-class neighborhood. A lot of the haters are just from New York and that’s how they act. I was born in Massachusetts and spent twenty-five years there and nobody ever told me I was supposed to hate Los Angeles. When at eleven not quite twelve I had a brief but legacy shaping obsession with all things California after—of course—The O.C. premiered this impulse was never squashed by any of the adults around me. They didn’t care. Who cares? I was raised to hate the Yankees, obviously, I’m not an animal, but New York was totally fine. And yet these people! What happened to them?? Still, “WHY do people hate Los Angeles?” is a time-wasting question. They hate it for whatever mostly imaginary reason they’ve made up in their head, just as we all do when we’ve decided to hate or even love something. We tell ourselves stories in order to bitch. The mental calculus is personal and not my concern. I just enjoy the fallout. The desperate posting. I’m very happy here. The public transit sucks and it stays hot too long but the bus gets me to work every morning still and you can swim in the ocean well through fall. LA is just another place in a world of them. The traffic is terrible, but the views knock your teeth out. The food is amazing, but you have to know where to go. The city management is as maliciously, murderously incompetent as in every other coastal bastion of liberalism. Wealth inequality lends a vulgar fun house quality to the day to day. But on certain special evenings the sunsets make the idea of a god seem not only possible but likely. California is beautifully bizarre. It shouldn’t exist as it does, this city, and I love it that way. And then there’s those Dodgers.

The quandary I trouble today has long been caught between by back molars, festering, but was summoned to the fore by this Defector article on the “WIN” button revealed by Dodger Stadium organist Dieter Ruehle. It is an unremarkably playful piece perfect to read while half asleep at your desk on a Friday morning. But the following caught my attention:

Currently, it appears to cue up "I Love L.A.," a song about how much L.A. sucks. While I support the sentiment, I think we can do better.

This is a view one finds all over the place. As the MLB playoffs have drawn ever nearer their precipice a person may observe users of the website formerly known as Twitter decrying Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.”, which is played at the conclusion of every Dodger win, as a song Angelenos are too stupid to know is making fun of them. This puzzles me. It’s a goofy song, sure, but I do not find in it the venom that avowed Los Angeles haters allege is clear. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”, a protest song repeatedly misused by dunce politicians as a rah-rah go America campaign anthem is a parallel these “I Love L.A.” detractors—it happens more broadly but you will find, if you click through to the Defector piece, that many commentors are making this comparison with great zeal, as a Venn diagram of people who care enough about baseball to be commenting on a random article about a MLB organist’s sound board and people who have some Bruce Springsteen trivia in their back pocket is basically a circle…. if you give a mouse a reading comprehension nugget etc.—like to employ to underline the low mental acuity of the average Dodgers celebrater, but I don’t really buy the comparison. While Springsteen’s anti-war, America is a death trap, we will all be burned by the black fire at the heart of this nation message can be missed only by those engaging in willful misunderstanding, Newman’s wry ode to his birthplace is something more complicated than that. Well, let’s look at it.

Hate New York City
It's cold and it's damp
And all the people dressed like monkeys
Let's leave Chicago to the Eskimos
That town's a little bit too rugged
For you and me, you bad girl

This soft first verse, buoyed by electric piano which dates in comfortingly, tells us only that Randy disdains the cold and likes hot babes. “And all the people dressed like monkeys” may not be true, exactly, but it is true to the Californians vision of that harsh East Coast metropolis in the sky. The born Californian is not comfortable with slacks or skyscrapers and I think it wrong and unfair that they be reviled for this natural condition. Spend a few months here and you get it. Spend a few years and you’re loathe to change out of sandals. Different, not better, but also not worse. Plus he’s got a bad girl. I’m calling this one for LA.

Rollin' down the Imperial Highway
With a big nasty redhead at my side
Santa Ana winds blowing hot from the north
And we as born to ride

Roll down the window, put down the top
Crank up the Beach Boys, baby
Don't let the music stop
We're gonna ride it till
We just can't ride it no more

At the thirty second mark, this song transforms into something new, which is very LA of it, anyway. A cheery wall of soft rock sounds borrowed in part from those very Beach Boys soon to be mentioned in the lyrics fall unto the listener. Now we party. The Santa Ana winds, surely, can be nasty, but they’re exciting too. There is a thrill, and a freedom to existing on the shaking, sunshine-y edge of the world. Who cares? Let’s play Pet Sounds. We were born to ride!!!!

From the South Bay to the Valley
From the West Side to the East Side
Everybody's very happy
'Cause the sun is shining all the time
Looks like another perfect day

I love L.A. (we love it)
I love L.A. (we love it)
We love it

Here we enter the meat of the song, which consists largely of Randy just naming places. I think a lot of negative interpretations of this song may come from those looking at LA from the outside and disdaining its fractured nature. That Los Angeles is a collection of separate neighborhoods weaved together by winding drives is not an insult to the city. It’s just a fact! It’s a fact that a lot of people don’t like, but that doesn’t make it some sort of gotcha. Los Angeles is a “real” city because real people live and die here by the millions and the fact that a lot of that living time takes place in a car ferrying them from one distinct locale to another is immaterial. As to the sun which Newman testifies is shining all the time, yeah, there’s sarcasm to any such claim. The weather in Los Angeles is seldom perfect. You get greedy. It’s too hot. For ages the temperature remains stubbornly stuck between warm enough for just a t shirt and cool enough for a jacket, refusing to give way to one or the other and allow a person peace in dressing. The sky was bluer last week. And come January it rains for heart sinking weeks. And even when its great out people suffer. And even when the sun shines there are problems. But perfect days are the reputation which precedes this city in the cultural imagination, and it can be joyful to pretend. We know better but why know better? Nothing is perfect but here we are. We love it!

Look at that mountain
Look at those trees
Look at that bum over there, man
He's down on his knees
Look at these women
There ain't nothing like 'em nowhere

Century Boulevard (we love it)
Victory Boulevard (we love it)
Santa Monica Boulevard (we love it)
Sixth Street (we love it, we love it)
We love L.A.

I love L.A. (we love it)
I love L.A. (we love it)
I love L.A. (we love it)

What is the American project is not a showplace for the dichotomy of profound natural beauty and abject human suffering. There is a crisis of homelessness in Los Angeles and a violent indifference on the part of the leaders who could do anything about it. This was true, too, when Randy Newman recorded this song in the 80s. Los Angeles is a city where immense wealth and opulent splendor conceal glitteringly and barely an underworld of extreme poverty and despair. This is true of most modern cities, is true to most societies in world history, but the sunlight and the movie stars and the mythical idea of surfboard boogie and free love and a mansion on the hill and streets of gold make the dirty truth seem, in LA, nastier. Crueler and uglier. This sense and feeling are a very real part of living here. But those from beyond who would cast stones could, should they choose to look, find their own horrors around the corner of whichever hamlet they’ve settled into. Yes, Newman’s list of streets is not exactly a collection of the most elegant locales. Are they not nonetheless driven down? And for all kinds of reasons. Even for joy. Does the mention of a “bum” “down on his knees” make this song an indictment against Los Angeles? Or is it merely a testament to the realities of living here. One who has already a particular hate in their heart for the city can of course count this is as a dig, but is it not, really, just the truth? Is it so bad to be able to see that and admit that and press on, too? I’m really wondering. I suppose, considering the unique blueprints of your heart and how its hallways are arranged then it depends. But I love it, I love it, it sucks, I love it.

Pressed, as he has often been, about the meaning of and intent behind “I Love L.A.” Newman himself said, "There's some kind of ignorance L.A. has that I'm proud of. The open car and the redhead, the Beach Boys... that sounds really good to me.” Some kind of ignorance. That I’m proud of! A dreamlike playland for the late-stage pioneer. No, something dumber, even. Summer Roberts said, “I’m not that dumb! Just shallow.” We have blood amidst the spectacle. All that sun goes on my real skin. LA is strange and silly and it’s here. We all are. Go Dodgers.