FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
10hr ago
Even as a confirmed John Lennon hater (this article might as well have been written about me), I can't find it in my heart to get too up in arms about that one. It's inoffensive background music with a predictable melody and chord progression, and it seems that, for once, John was able to persuade Yoko not to do any atonal wailing and screeching atop it. Nowhere near as irritating as any of my least favourite Christmas songs, from a compositional, lyrical or sonic standpoint.
FtttG
11hr ago
Thanks for the review. It's on my bookshelf, I might give it a go in the new year.
Christmas songs thread
We're quickly approaching the end of the period of the year in which Christmas songs are an omnipresent aural nuisance, so I thought it'd be a good opportunity for us to talk about our favourite and least favourite songs in that genre. I am here defining a Christmas song as an original composition in the pop genre created for commercial reasons, and hence excluding all carols and traditional tunes.
Favourite Christmas songs
- "The Christmas Song" — Nat King Cole: An obvious choice perhaps, but it occurred to me this year that there is literally no other Christmas song I prefer. Cole may have had the single most beautiful male singing voice in the history of pop music: I found myself tearing up in the office a little bit, not because this song is sad, but simply for how remarkably rich and sonorous the timbre of his voice is. The chord progressions and instrumental arrangement still sound fresh and unexpected eighty years later, and the production is warm and intimate. It's amazing to me that this song may well have seen more airplay than all of the other entries on both lists combined (definitely if you count all of its innumerable cover versions), and yet it still doesn't feel "overexposed" to me.
- "The Power of Love" — Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Widely considered a Christmas song even though the lyrics don't refer to the holiday even indirectly, its cover artwork and music video nevertheless had a strong Nativity theme. An arrangement and vocal performance so striking and forceful that it completely overpowered the act's original camp ironic intent — listening to it, it's almost impossible to believe it's from the same album as "Relax" (also a great song in its own way).
- "Fairytale of New York" — The Pogues: This long occupied my #1 spot, which probably had more to do with a sense of misplaced nationalism than anything else. But in spite of that, I cannot deny how stirring I find the traditional arrangement, MacGowan's limitations as a vocalist are well-compensated for by the duet format with MacColl (all the more haunting now that both singers have left us), and the nostalgic-yet-venomous lyrics make it easily the most bittersweet Christmas song ever composed.
- "Driving Home for Christmas" — Chris Rea: Charming and jaunty, with a wonderfully grizzled vocal from Rea.
- "All I Want for Christmas is You" — Mariah Carey: I don't care if it's overplayed: Carey's vocal performance is a staggering accomplishment, the composition and arrangement sound timeless (it's no accident that "who originally sang AIWFCIY" is a common Google search: it does legitimately sound like a song first composed in the 60s and given a fresh arrangement by Carey in the 90s, and I mean that as a compliment), and it's aged far better than most Christmas songs (hell, most songs) from the era of its first release. Carey's retirement plan was well-earned.
Honorable mentions: "Santa Tell Me" by Ariana Grande, "Snowman" by Sia, the only decent original Christmas songs composed in the last thirty years.
Least favourite Christmas songs
An effective punchline would just be for to me to write "1. All the other ones", but that's not in keeping with the spirit of this space, so to be more specific:
- "Merry Xmas Everybody" — Slade: This is what Hell sounds like to me. Tedious, monotonous arrangement; performances which are both boring and bored-sounding (as if the musicians can't believe they're debasing themselves by recording a Christmas song, and are just gritting their teeth and trying to get through it as quickly as possible); flat, muffled 70s production; a tiresome and not remotely catchy chorus which recurs a whopping six times, as if the band are hoping to beat you into submission through rote repetition alone. It's appropriate that this song is guaranteed to get played at every boring office Christmas party where no one really wants to be there and the cheap white wine isn't serving as an effective social lubricant, as it literally sounds like a boring office Christmas party. It occurred to me this year that I literally cannot think of any song where, if forced to choose between listening to this song and another song, I would pick "Merry Xmas Everybody": it is just that annoying. Any of the musical compositions released by Crazy Frog (who was literally designed to be annoying)? Yes. "Cotton Eye Joe"? by Rednex? Yes, in a heartbeat. Anything by Limp Bizkit or Nickelback? Easily. "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt? No question. "Zombie" by the Cranberries? Definitely. Anything by 100 gecs? No doubt. The only song which I might have to think about for a minute is "What's Up?" by 4 Non Blondes, and they'd probably still cinch it in the end. Seriously. Fuck this song.
- "Do They Know It's Christmas?" — Band Aid: Music criticism is a difficult discipline because it can be enormously challenging to convey in words why you find a particular melody annoying, why a synth tone gets on your nerves, what it means to say that a vocal performance sounds lifeless or that a mix sounds sterile. Faced with this obstacle, a lot of music critics retreat from music criticism and focus instead on lyrical criticism (which really has more in common with literary criticism), as it's much easier to convey in written words why you think a piece of text is badly written. It's striking how often lists of "worst pop songs ever" are really lists of perfectly adequate pop songs with bad (or "offensive") lyrics e.g. perennials like Paul Anka's "You're Having my Baby" or Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" — I don't think anyone would argue that either song is especially obnoxious from a compositional or performance standpoint. An excessive focus among critics on lyrical quality over musical quality rather misunderstands the nature of the enjoyment the average listener gets from music: "great composition with mediocre lyrics" is probably the rule rather than the exception among beloved pop songs, and lyrics have to be really bad before they'll make me not want to listen to a well-composed, well-produced song (the only example which immediately springs to mind is "Hardly Getting Over It" by Hüsker Dü, which literally would have been better as an instrumental); conversely, I don't care how good your lyrics are if the composition sucks and the performances are annoying (i.e. Bob Dylan and 90% of post-punk music sucks). This is a very lengthy preamble to convey that, from a musical, compositional standpoint, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" is actually fine: Phil Collins's drumming is solid, the synth tones haven't aged half as poorly as many from that era, the melody is legitimately catchy, and the dozen or more vocalists sound like they're giving it their all. But the lyrics are so obnoxious, smarmy and self-important that it's all for naught. There won't be snow in Ireland this Christmastime either — where's our charity single? I understand that Bob Geldof (who wrote the song alongside omnipresent 80s journeyman Midge Ure) rather regrets the song, although for my part I would still say it's one of the better-composed songs in his back catalogue, and doesn't sound half as dated or irritating as "Rat Trap" or "I Don't Like Mondays". But more than just the obnoxious lyrics, when listening to this song I can't help but think it might be indirectly responsible for the ensuing decades of pompous grandstanding from pop, rock and punk musicians. Every time a punk band has paused in between songs so the singer can deliver an impassioned but clumsy ten-minute speech about how Orang Man Bad, Save Teh Trees and Muh Free Palestine, they're channelling the holier-than-thou spirit of Band Aid, if unwittingly (even if they would profess to despise the song for its white saviour qualities).
- "Christmas Tree Farm" — Taylor Swift: This song was unavoidable on the radio last year, and I didn't know who it was by but found it enormously irritating. This year I Shazam'd it, discovered that it's by Swift and thought — well, that checks out. I have to admit, the Cult of Swift is one of the things I find most baffling and alienating about the modern era. I'll hear people gush about how memorable and timeless her songs are, and then I listen to them and they sound functionally indistinguishable from those of any other teenybopper (by popular consensus her artistic peak was "All Too Well", and to me that sounds like a Sixpence None the Richer cut that they left off the album for not meeting their rigorous quality control standards). I'll hear people talk about how her lyrics make her the spokesperson for an entire generation of Western women (hell, Western people) — and then I read them and they're just spiteful put-downs towards her contemporaries or an embarrassing list of groan-worthy penis puns. Far from "growing with her audience", Swift now seems even more spoiled and adolescent than she did when she actually was an adolescent. Who knew the weird horsey girl and the toothy-head giving (but I repeat myself) demographics wielded such power and influence?
- Anything by Michael Bublé: Mickey Bubbles: "As a self-confessed Christmas prostitute, I would like to release a Christmas song." Producer: "Okay cool, let's come up with a chord progression and a vocal melody." Bubbles: "No, I don't want to write a Christmas song — that would take too much effort. I just want to record a cover and release it." Producer: "Okay, why don't we do a straight cover of $ChristmasSong? After all, it has such a memorable melody and hook that it's been beloved by generations of Westerners. A cover version is sure to do numbers." Bubbles: "Awesome. But I want to put my own spin on it, so I'm going to alter the phrasing and introduce loads of completely unnecessary syncopation and flourishes until the original melody is barely recognisable." Producer: "... okay, I see where you're coming from. But the entire reason people liked the original is because of its memorable and instantly recognisable melody." Bubbles: "Yeah." Producer: "... and so if you release a cover that has the same lyrics as the original but the melody and phrasing are altered beyond recognition, people won't like it as much. In fact, they'll probably find it really annoying and distracting." Bubbles: "Yeah." Producer: "... and that would be bad." Bubbles: "Yeah."
- "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" — Bruce Springsteen: I needed something to round off the list, and it was either this or "A Spaceman Came Travelling" by Chris de Burgh: that one seems to have fallen out of favour quite a bit and I can only recall hearing it once this Christmas, whereas I heard "The Boss"'s (ugh) rendition of this classic several times a week since mid-November. Aside from Clarence Clemons's lively saxophone break, this isn't a patch on the Jackson Five version, and Springsteen's pre-song ad-libs to the audience and his backing band are impossibly grating and forced. The Cult of Springsteen isn't as hard to understand as the Cult of Dylan (unlike Bob Dylan, Springsteen can carry a tune, and I can't argue with the sheer majesty of "Born to Run"), but the more of his music I'm exposed to the more overrated I find him*, and many of his affectations seem just as contrived as those of, say, Bono. Even seeing him perform live didn't move the needle for me much (granted that seeing him perform when he's in his seventies is going to be a very different experience to seeing him perform as a younger man). Maybe I should listen to Nebraska from start to finish and it'll click for me.
Dishonorable mentions: "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" by Patsy & Elmo, "Stay Another Day" by East 17, "Run Rudolph Run" by Chuck Berry, "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" by Gayla Peevey.
*I understand why he objects to "Born in the USA" being played at Republican rallies by politicians who seem to have missed the point of the song; on the other hand, perhaps he should be grateful that the song is played in public at all because it fucking sucks, and the less said about "Dancing in the Dark" the better.
FtttG
13hr ago
The Children of Men was on my to-read list for this year, but in the end I deliberately decided not to read it. What did you make of it? How did it compare to the film adaptation (assuming you've seen it)?
FtttG
2d ago
I read The Road and was sobbing literally for hours when I got to the end. That's what you ought to expect.
FtttG
2d ago
Two Yankees pitchers traded families in the 70s.
Could you elaborate on this?
FtttG
2d ago
A passage from Cryptonomicon which had me laughing out loud on the train this morning (no spoilers):
Nevertheless, there are three messages from Kia, Epiphyte's only actual employee, the administrative assistant for the whole company. Kia works in a totally alienated, abstracted office in the Springboard Capital corporate incubator complex in San Mateo. It is some sort of a federal regulation that nascent high-tech companies must not hire pudgy fifty-year-old support staff, the way big established companies do. They must hire topologically enhanced twenty-year-olds with names that sound like new models of cars. Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers. In the part of a federal equal-opportunity form where Randy would simply check a box labeled ᴄᴀᴜᴄᴀsɪᴀɴ, Kia would have to attach multiple sheets on which her family tree would be ramified backwards through time ten or twelve generations until reaching ancestors who could actually be pegged to one specific ethnic group without glossing anything over, and those ethnic groups would be intimidatingly hip ones — not Swedes, let's say, but Lapps, and not Chinese but Hakka, and not Spanish but Basque. Instead of doing this, on her job app for Epiphyte she simply checked "other" and then wrote in ᴛʀᴀɴs-ᴇᴛʜɴɪᴄ. In fact, Kia is trans- just about every system of human categorization, and what she isn't trans- she is post-.
This book came out in 1999. Intellectually, I was aware that what we call wokeness was previously ascendant in the nineties, at which time it was called "political correctness". Still though — if you didn't know better, you would assume that the passage above had been published in the last ten years.
FtttG
2d ago
I can't imagine even the most gung-ho Americans would want to be publicly associated with a band called something like "Waterboarding".
The name "Kneecap" specifically refers to the IRA torturing suspected informants. I think this scans rather differently to torture committed by agents of the state, which is the first thing people think of when they hear "waterboarding". A lot of Irish people still carry a residual fondness for the IRA (hell, one of our most popular political parties is literally the parliamentary wing of the IRA). I agree that American politicians would probably not want to be publicly affiliated with a band who named themselves after a torture technique used by agents of the state. But there are plenty of Democratic politicians who are eager to sing the praises of hip-hop musicians, many of which describe murdering e.g. their rival drug dealers in their lyrics.
FtttG
2d ago
A few weeks ago I spoke about Ireland's new President, the outspoken leftist Catherine Connolly. So far, her presidency is going about as expected:
I didn't think it was possible to be so annoyed by a single sentence.
*The President's residence in Dublin's Phoenix Park.
**A hip-hop band from Northern Ireland who were recently facing charges in the UK of incitement to violence and offering support to proscribed organisations, owing to their conduct at various gigs in which they urged attendees to "murder [their] local MP", chanting "Up Hamas" and leading attendees in chants of "Ooh! Ah! Hezbollah!"
FtttG
5d ago
The edition of The Outsiders I read was a mere 216 pages, you could comfortably read it in a few hours if you were so inclined.
FtttG
7d ago
A Confederacy of Dunces: Absolutely the funniest thing I've ever read
I'm going to have to beg to differ on this one, I really did not understand the hype. Most of the book I just felt sorry for this fucking loser's poor mother.
FtttG
7d ago
Less Than Zero by Ellis
I'm not sure if he ever surpassed the debut. Maybe his sophomore novel, The Rules of Attraction. Less Than Zero might be the only book of his which isn't way too long.
It was probably my third favorite fiction book this year, as evidenced by the fact I read the 600-page tome in 2 days.
Glad I wasn't the only one here who loved it.
300, Frank Miller
I haven't read this one, but I have read The Dark Knight Returns and a few Sin City comics.
There's a stock narrative in comic books, that Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (gritty, confrontational deconstructions of American superhero comics) ushered in the dark age of superhero comics in the 90s and early 2000s, in which creators like Todd MacFarlane and Rob Liefeld were constantly pushing the boundaries of acceptability as far as sex, violence etc. go, but missing the subtlety and nuance that made Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns so effective.
I think this critique has merit when it comes to Watchmen, even though I no longer hold it in as high esteem as I once did (not because of its edgy content – in point of fact I think Moore's later From Hell is superior, in spite of being even more violent and raunchy – but because of its "look how clever I am" qualities). But to be quite honest, I don't think it's applicable to Miller. All of his works that I've read have seemed exactly as crass, one-dimensional and grimdark-for-the-sake-of-grimdark as MacFarlane and co.'s are made out to be. I will concede that Miller is a better artist than Liefeld (but then, who isn't?), but that's not the form the critique generally takes: it specifically holds that Miller is superior because of his greater sophistication and nuance in storytelling than his imitators. And nothing in his oeuvre that I've read has come close to justifying that claim.
Like you, my new year's resolution was to read at least 26 books this year from start to finish*. It's not quite the end of the year and I'm fairly confident I'll add Cryptonomicon to the list before January 1st, but seeing as we're all doing it, here's my list. At the time of writing I've read 28 books from start to finish this year (16 by male writers, 12 by female), in chronological order:
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Rejection (#3 fiction) – in spite of certain reservations, I can't deny that this was one of the most entertaining books I read this year, primarily on the strength of its first three stories. It is a terminally online brainrot novel: it's also pretty good.
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Katalin Street – a solid novel which offered me some insight into the experiences of Hungarian Jews during and after the second world war, which I'll never read again.
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Boy Parts (#2 fiction) – wonderfully nasty. Wears its influences on its sleeve (it's basically "what if, instead of an American male stockbroker, Patrick Bateman was a female British fetish photographer?") but puts enough of a spin on it to carve out its own identity. Its protagonist (as a friend of mine put it, a "female fuckboy") is vicious and awful, but never to the point of feeling like a caricature, and it made me empathise with one of her victims a great deal. The only thing that will date this book to the early 2020s is the insincere woke window dressing: no one is fooled by the token trans man character. It doesn't matter what you "identify" as: the message of the book, to me, was that there are men and there are women, and sometimes men are awful to women but women can also be awful to men, and there's nothing remotely "empowering" about the latter.
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The Trial – Dull as dishwater and a chore to get through. I loved Metamorphosis, so I don't know what kind of off-day Kafka was having when he wrote this. Numerous artistic works have induced the "Kafkaesque" sensation far better than the work widely credited with introducing it.
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Montaillou – I read this extremely dry academic work for research, and it was extremely difficult to get through but occasionally interesting.
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Orbán: Europe's New Strongman (#2 non-fiction) – I read this for research, but found it eminently readable and informative. Highly recommended if you're interested in the modern far-right and democratic backsliding.
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Kiki de Montparnasse – a biography of some French woman who appeared in photos in the 1920s, in the form of a graphic novel. It was fine.
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The Garden of Forking Paths – a short collection of several of Borges's stories, including the one of the same name. Thought-provoking and prescient.
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The Door – also by Magda Szabo, author of Katalin Street above. Longer, slower-paced and not as good.
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The Disaster Artist (#3 non-fiction) – OH HAI MARK. The most purely entertaining work of non-fiction I've read all year. I imagine even someone who's never seen The Room would find it interesting, particularly in its examination of life at the bottom of the Hollywood ladder. Virtually all Hollywood memoirs are by people who've succeeded there and hence chock-full of survivorship bias-laden advice about the importance of working hard and never giving up on your dreams: it's still refreshing (and quite sad) to be reminded that you can be strikingly handsome, a decent actor, have the relevant contacts, be hard-working, determined – and still not make it. Also vastly superior to its workmanlike film adaptation.
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Mina's Matchbox – fine, but some of these modern Japanese novels feel a bit formulaic.
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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – pretty cool, I love anything Lovecraft-adjacent.
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Spoilt Rotten (#5 non-fiction) – who doesn't like a phlegmatic, digressive rant about how England sucks because of woke?
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The Man in the High Castle – interesting and provocative, but doesn't really work as a novel (unlike my beloved A Scanner Darkly). Constantly jumps between a diverse collection of characters whose plotlines barely intersect and few of which have any kind of escalation or payoff. A "slice of life" alternate history novel, if such a thing exists.
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The Perfect Heresy – like Montaillou, I read this extremely dry academic work for research, and like Montaillou it was extremely difficult to get through but occasionally interesting.
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Unsong – technically my second read, although Scott edited it quite significantly from the web serial version. As I said a few months ago, a mixed bag. Scott is nowhere near as good at writing fiction as he is at writing blog posts – but his blog posts are among the best in the world, so he shouldn't feel too bad about that.
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It Starts with the Egg – I read (skimmed, really) this one for research. Very informative.
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The Secret of our Success (#1 non-fiction) – fascinating, one of those tremendous works of pop science that makes you go "ohhhhh that makes so much sense" every other page.
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The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (#4 fiction) – tore through it in three days. When Christie's on form, you can't beat her. Best if you go into it blind. Going to see The Mousetrap tomorrow night, can't wait.
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Free – comparisons with Elena Ferrante are apt. An interesting and informative eyewitness memoir of Albania's difficult transition from socialism to a market economy.
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Speaker for the Dead – I loved Ender's Game, but alas can't say the same about the sequel. Found it quite dull, honestly.
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Stories of Your Life – I loved it almost as much as Chiang's other collection, Exhalation. Highly recommended.
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The Year of Magical Thinking (#4 non-fiction) – the only work of non-fiction that made me tear up this year. Essential reading for anyone who's lost a spouse, and anyone who doesn't want to.
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The Remains of the Day (#5 fiction) – I didn't like it as much as Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, but it was still really good. Further thoughts.
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Doxology (worst book of the year) – I hated this book so much I ranted about it for several hundred words here. The most consistently annoyed I've felt reading a book all year – indeed, perhaps for the last decade. I find it hard to imagine a person who would enjoy reading this book, even if (unlike me) they agreed with its politics or had a particular interest in the subject matter (New York's punk and indie rock scene in the 80s and 90s). Irredeemable trash. Please don't let Zink publish another book again. This isn't just a question of a plot development that didn't pass the smell test or a single unlikeable character: on a stylistic level, her writing is fundamentally, irretrievably bad.
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The Outsiders – the best book I've ever read that was written by a 16-year-old, not that that's saying much.
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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (#1 fiction) – I had a feeling halfway through that this would top my list for the year's fiction. Granted that I've only read one book from start to finish since, but nothing is yet to dethrone it, even after reflecting on the other books I read this year. A lot of you disagreed with my gushing, but misgivings about its politics aside, I simply cannot deny the emotional impact this book had on me. Any novel that can make me feel like I know its characters personally and desperately want them to get what's best for them is doing something right. Heartbreaking and moving.
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The Story of a New Name – as I said, I can really admire what Ferrante is doing on an intellectual level, and yet her novels for the most part leave me cold. The impact would have been heightened were her books not so frightfully slow.
*Thereby excluding The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I started reading last December and which probably would have made my top 5 for fiction had it been included.
Some time ago I posted about the absurd arrest of Graham Linehan upon his return to the UK from the states. One of the tweets which prompted his arrest was a photo of a trans activist protest accompanied by the caption "a photo you can smell".
FtttG
10d ago
I think there's an important distinction between "working hard, but also availing of public benefits (like healthcare etc.)" and "not working and availing of social welfare".
pedant alarm Strictly speaking this is a McCartney solo single. Obviously I agree with you, I despised this song for years before learning it was written by a man widely considered to be one of the best songwriters of the twentieth century. What the fuck kind of off-day was he having?
As part of my ongoing war against the intrusion of American culture into Ireland, I recently learned to my dismay that children in primary schools are now being instructed to say "happy holidays" rather than "happy Christmas". In Dublin, the river Liffey runs through the city, with the southside stereotypically considered more posh and affluent than the comparatively impoverished northside, and whenever I venture into the southside I discover that it's been so infected by secular woke nonsense that they literally aren't celebrating any religious holiday anymore. Seriously: the Christmas lights (for everyone knows that's what they are) fall under the banner of "Winter in Dublin".
Winter in Dublin. What the fuck. Every time I see that stupid sign I want to tear it down. I'm sure if I asked whatever idiotic gang of apparatchiks responsible for the decision why they went for "Winter in Dublin" rather than "Christmas in Dublin", they would be completely unable to articulate why, just listing off a string of incomprehensible woke word salad about "inclusive" and "modern Ireland". It's got me thinking about the concept of asymmetric multiculturalism: Christians in Christian countries aren't supposed to ostentatiously celebrate their faiths, but Muslims in Christian countries can do so to their hearts' content. No Muslim in Ireland is going to be saying "happy holidays" to any of his co-religionists when Ramadan next rolls around. But to my relief, I noticed that one set of Christmas lights on the northside wishes everyone a happy Christmas, not a happy (ugh) "winter in Dublin". Working-class Dubs evidently have no time for woke nonsense of this description.
(In Dublin City Council's defense, there's also this sign reading "Nollaig Shona Duit" on the southside's Grafton St, one of Dublin's main shopping streets. "Nollaig Shona Duit" is Irish for "happy Christmas". The message is crystal clear: you can celebrate your faith, as long as you do so in a language no Muslim is likely to understand.)
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