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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
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:
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.
In a similar spirit, I listened to three Christmas albums front to back while I was cleaning the house yesterday, and I will review them here:
Emmylou Harris—Light of the Stable (1979)
Progressive Country was the 1970s reaction to what was perceived as an increasingly homogenized and commercialized Nashville sound. The most notable expression of it was in the Outlaw Country of Waylon and Willie, but the genre was much broader, and included anyone who emphasized the folk/blues/roots music that country was based on. It was the progenitor of what we would now call Americana. Emmylou Harris was part of this movement (if you could call it a movement), and had one of the most consistent album runs of any country musician I've heard; Boulder to Birmingham may be one of the finest country songs of all time, and everything she released bewteen 1975 and 1981 is worth listening to. Except for this. Granted, there's nothing particularly offensive about it, but it's mostly just unspectacular traditional country versions of Christmas songs. I say mostly because the title track is the exception, and deserves to be part of the contemporary Christmas music canon. Harris may not be a household name, but one would think that the guest vocals by Dolly Parton, Neil Young, and Linda Ronstadt would count for something. Then again, this was actually released as a single back in 1975, and the album recorded four years later mostly as padding, so whether it's even necessary is questionable. 3/5.
Elvis Presley—Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas (1971)
This could also be called Elvis Sings Lame Renditions of Bad Christmas Songs for Money. The program contains 2 sacred Christmas songs, 2 traditional pop Christmas songs, a bunch of conemporary country Christmas songs that are so uninspired that none were good enough to be released as singles, and a decent version of Merry Christmas Baby. I say decent because it doesn't hold a candle to the Charles Brown original. The contemporary material wouldn't be horrible, except it's overly reliant on key changes to keep the forward momentum, and they include a vocal group called The Imperials who sound like they also did the Love Theme from Airplane. 2/5.
Bright Eyes—A Christmas Album (2002)
Bright Eyes is the project of Conor Oberst, a North Carolina singer/songwriter/indie rocker who released a bunch of shitty, half-written, self-indulgent albums before finding his footing circa 2005 and absolutely killing it thereafter. Indie rockers don't often release Christmas albums, but when they do they usually consciously try to do something other than go through the motions, and this album is no exception. Unfortunately, this means that we get what is possibly the only slowcore Christmas album. The 11 cuts are all either sacred or secular classics played in a way seemingly intended to make a festive season outright depressing. To make matters worse, he fumbles the ball by using Frank Sinatra's jollied-up lyrics to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" rather than the depressing original ones. It gets bonus points for trying, and there's reason to listen to this, even if you won't want to listen to it again. 2.5/5.
"You're Having My Baby" is terrible from any standpoint, and the lyrics only make it worse. "MacArthur Park" is brilliant and was recognized as such at the time, but it suffered from three huge problems that have made it a Boomer punchline in the years since. The first is the unfortunate lyric about the cake, which is really the only thing that's remarkable about they lyric but nonetheless sounds ridiculous. The second problem is that in the musical world post-Sgt. Pepper there were a lot of attempts to write pop music with the same level of sophistication as classical music, and while MacArthur Park was definitely in this vein it featured an overwrought arrangement behind an actor who couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. The final reason is that a decade later Donna Summer recorded a disco version. While disco's critical reputation has been salvaged in the years since, contemporary observers are generally talking about stuff like Chic that has some degree of R&B grounding, not Giorgio Moroder's Euro-trash arrangements. That song is an object lesson in why people began to hate disco.
But it's otherwise a great song. For years my only exposure to the song was my dad's vinyl copy of Maynard Ferguson's Live at Jimmy's album, and the big band version included on it is a tour de force. Pretty much every high school band director I knew loved that version, and I've played various arrangements of it in community bands and the like over the years. It's a shame that these days it's seen as nothing more than a punchline.
I'd rather listen to this than anything by Frankie Does a Pound of Blow, Bangs a Hooker in the Back of His DeLorean, Then Watches Miami Vice and Drinks New Coke. I don't have a problem with that song, though they probably don't play it on the radio as much over here as they do in the British Isles. In any event, Wizzard is much better, if only because a.) Roy Wood actually wanted to do a Christmas song and wasn't acting at the behest of his manager, and b.) They understood that a glam Christmas song would work best if the 50s nostalgia factor was cranked to 11. Remember, this was the year American Graffiti came out.
Interestingly enough, the version that's almost universally played is actually a rerecording. Nat King Cole originally recorded this in 1946 with the King Cole Trio (Cole on piano plus bass and guitar). The first version is jazzier and only features the trio. The original hit version was the first version released and uses the same arrangement as the common version, though Cole's voice wasn't as mature as it would later become and still has bit of an R&B flavor. He recorded it again in 1953 to get a higher fidelity version on magnetic tape. Nelson Riddle, best known for his work with Frank Sinatra, provides an arrangement that is faithful to the original but a bit lusher. The mono recording also has Cole's vocals more forward. The version you are almost certainly familiar with is the stereo version from 1961, by which point Cole's voice had fully matured.
Soul singer Carla Thomas did record All I Want for Christmas Is You in 1963. But it's an entirely different song so I guess it doesn't count. It's also not very good.
I always felt that this was the song's Achilles Heel; as much as it tries to be cynical, it's really just a love song. If you want unfiltered Christmas cynicism listen to Blue Xmas by Miles Davis. Guest singer Bob Dorough does not sound as if he's capable of experiencing joy. If that's a bit too blunt, there's [I Bought You a Plastic Star for Your Aluminum Tree] by Michael Franks, who balances his cynicism with humor rather than sentimentality. Franks and Dorough both being Jews probably has something to do with this.
There's a scene in the movie Ray where one of the guys in the booth is irritated that Ray seems to be imitating Nat King Cole and Charles Brown. Buble inhabit the uncanny valley where it isn't clear if he's trying to imitate Frank Sinatra or Mel Torme, all with a healthy dose of auto-tune on top to make things even weirder.
I once heard someone describe Springsteen's music as sounding like it was taken from a musical about rock and roll, and I have to say I agree. It's not so much that there's anything particularly bad about his music, it's just that it's dripping with so much blue collar earnestness that it verges on parody. To get back to the Wizzard song, one thing Roy Wood understood is that 50s throwbacks have a certain amount of inherent cheesiness and that by embracing that cheese you can toe the line between parody and earnest tribute; hell, Ween made an entire career on toeing that line. But it's a fine line, and on the other side of it is Meatloaf, an artist who actually cut his teeth in rock musicals. The cult of Dylan makes more sense to me because Dylan was instrumental in moving the music beyond where it was in the early 1960s. Springsteen inspired John Mellencamp and Melissa Etheridge but the whole Heartland Rock thing was basically a stylistic dead end.
I've felt the same way for a long time. For all of the hype Sift gets there is maybe one song that I'd recognize as hers, and it isn't due to lack of exposure, to be sure. I can't even say that I necessarily dislike her; everything I've heard has been in one ear and out the other. It's like her music is so unmemorable that my memory of it is being erased in real time.
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