I live in a large city (so large, in fact, that it is the largest city in the U.S.) and at this time of year every store, restaurant, outdoor vendor, elevator loudspeaker, subway busker and group of faux military-clad musicians on street corners are all playing Christmas music. In my immediate neighborhood on the main shopping strip, they have rigged up an outdoor speaker system that plays the stuff 24 hours a day at near heavy-metal volume. It has become a sort of surreal backdrop with different versions of the same song coming from a variety of sources as you walk down the street. It happens pretty much the same way every year, starting sometime after Halloween and ending rather suddenly on January 2nd.
Obviously, the point is mainly to get us in the mood to shop, and to create some patina of “Christmas Cheer” on the increasingly depressing daily grind that passes as a lifestyle for most people. But I have to admit I kind of like Christmas music. Certainly not all of it — in fact, not most of it. But there is just so much of it that even narrowed down to my very absolute favorites, it still would take about seven and a half hours to play all the way through the songs in my “Xmas Favorites” playlist in my itunes.
What has always intrigued me about holiday music is that it is kind of a challenge to songwriters and musicians. It's a very limited subject matter with a pretty specific set of rules, both sonic (more sleighbells, anyone?) and lyrical (it's better if you mention snow no later than the second verse). And unlike any other genre of music, no one holds it against you if you record the same song that hundreds of other people have already recorded.
You have to admit that it's kind of weird that for about five weeks a year, everybody in the country is listening to (or subjected to) music solely about the same single day (or twelve days, or a vague “season”). According to a piece in the Chicago Tribune in 2003, almost 400 radio stations across the country switched to a 24-hour “holiday music” format during that December, and I don’t think that's changed much since. And there's even that added frisson of Christian nation/secular nation that has been so much the currency in these fractured times: the fact that America's biggest holiday is “Christ's birthday” — or is it the secular “holiday season," mainly predicated around buying stuff? You have songs arguing both sides of that divide. And as if the American cultural schizophrenia wasn't complete, a majority of the American Christmas cultural artifacts use the theme “Christmas is not really about the commercialism, etc.” in order to sell you stuff. Those old enough to remember seeing A Charlie Brown Christmas when first broadcast, with its “true meaning of Christmas” message and Linus reading the Gospel of Luke and all that, will remember it was very aggressively (and somewhat intrusively) “Brought to you by Coca Cola.”
But is there such a thing as a “good” Christmas song? Well, I think so. Everybody has their favorites (well not everybody, but that's another story), but I like the ones that invest the formula with some genuine emotion, or that use “the season” as a springboard to talk about something bigger than “the season.” And some of them are just such great music that you end up playing them all year round. In addition, “the holidays” have become such a huge part of people's social, emotional, and financial lives that they can never live up to what most people hope for them. And there has always been a sad irony for many people sinking into (or already mired in) poverty while being inundated with songs about unlimited toys and Christmas cheer, or being alone when they are “supposed” to be partying with partners and families, etc. So I'm attracted to Christmas songs that catch the happy/sad duality of the season.
For me the essential Christmas album is Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas. There's no Coca Cola (or Gospel of Luke, either) on this amazing Christmas-themed jazz album. Many people are familiar with the music as background for the perennial TV special, or the song “Christmas Time Is Here” that has become a standard. But you can really start to appreciate the charm and musicality of this collection by listening to it as a whole (and divorcing it from the TV show in your mind, if you can). Guaraldi, a highly respected west coast jazz hipster in the Dave Brubeck tradition, took the songs down to their frames and rebuilt them with minor voicings and a nimble, swinging rhythm section. For instance, his take on “Little Drummer Boy”, called “My Little Drum," reduces the words to the percussive background of the children's chorus, while he builds a jazz verse/chorus structure on a reinterpretation of the original chord progression, interspersed with witty, meticulously played solos. The added bonus of the album is that, unlike pretty much every other Holiday album, it has songs that have nothing to do with Christmas (for instance, the remarkable “Linus and Lucy” and “Skating”) that have become “Christmas music” purely due to context.
The other “essential” Christmas album is, of course, the legendary A Christmas Gift For You by Phil Spector and The Ronettes, Crystals, etc. This is the album that for better or worse put “rock music” and “Christmas” together in the way we still hear it today. Springsteen's “Santa Claus is Coming To Town” that I linked at the beginning of this piece is not just a cover of “Santa Claus” but a cover of The Crystal's version of the song that appears on Christmas Gift. The arrangement of Mariah Carey's 1994 hit “All I Want For Christmas Is You” could have come right off this album. Until this album came out in 1963, few people had linked Christmas music with such energetic (and in some cases bombastic) arrangements. There are some duds here (Was it really necessary to have another version of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus?” or “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers”?) but the best songs still explode out of the speakers and take no prisoners. Check out “Frosty The Snowman" —with drummer Hal Blaine pounding away in the foreground, it chugs through the opening lines and then blasts into overdrive, with Ronnie Spector wailing across the top. This might have been the first punk rock Christmas album.
Other than those two albums, one list is as good as another. There are plenty of genres within this genre. For instance, some people (not me!) like the novelty numbers, with poor departed Grandma and those dogs that bark “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” (I refuse to link to this — even I have standards), or kids that would prefer getting teeth to presents (as if!). Or you can go country — pretty much every country singer ever signed to a recording contract has done a Christmas record and, among many others, Dolly Parton and George Jones have done good ones. Soul and R&B singers also have a history of jumping on the Christmas money train — sometimes with excellent results. You can listen to Solomon Burke sing “Presents for Christmas” or Otis Redding sing “Merry Christmas Baby." There are also Reggae, New Age, Rap, Shoegaze, Drum n Bass, Jam Band, Disco, Emo, Screamo, Industrial, and Death Metal Christmas songs (or at least I think there probably are). And don't forget Classical — and by “classical” I mean selections from The Nutcracker (and occasionally selections from Handel's Messiah for those listening to classical radio stations).
A kind of novelty I do like is Christmas songs by artists who wouldn't ordinarily be doing Christmas songs. Springsteen's covers, only done live, are a lot of fun. After listening to Otis Redding's “Merry Christmas Baby," you can listen to the indie rock band Okkervill River's “Listening to Otis Redding At Home During Christmas." Joni Mitchell's “River” has become a holiday standard, although I don't think she meant it that way. On the political front, John Lennon's “Happy Xmas (War is Over)" has the perfect tone of peacenik melancholy for its subject matter, while The Kink's “Father Christmas” plays out its class warfare theme while sounding pretty much like, well, The Kinks. An obscure favorite is “Christmas Weather” by the long-gone New York band The Student Teachers. Or the British indie duo Slow Club's great “Christmas Thanks For Nothing” off their holiday EP. There's also the Jimi Hendrix Merry Christmas & Happy New Year EP with its Christmas medley , Joan Jett's "Little Drummer Boy," and the Ramones “Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight)”, another song so Phil Spector-influenced you can almost hear Darlene Love singing it in your head. Or Elvis' "Blue Christmas," which gets pretty much played out each December. And don't forget the Rolling Stones (to go right to Xmas on this one, start it at 7:56), as well as Keith Richards and his friends covering Chuck Berry. Plus, there are the Beatles' famed goon-show-like Christmas records, distributed only to fan club members every year from 1963-69. All of them are “interesting” to listen to (at least once). The best one is probably 1967, which contains a sort of actual song, “Christmas Time Is Here Again,” along with some funny skit fragments and song extracts (you might be surprised to know that there is a Beatles song called “Plenty of Jam Jars”) And on and on and on.
I know I've neglected many people's sentimental favorites and beloved obscure-os, as well as actual Christmas Carols (which are nice, too). But to do a real survey would take 100s of pages and you would fall asleep in the middle of it (and I would as well). I can boil it down to this — I like a real song, even at Christmas time. If it's a little sad, I like it a little more. If it sounds like somebody actually cared about it when they were singing it, so much the better. It's also nice if the person can really sing (although my Joan Jett choice proves that's not a requirement). Basically I've just described this , and if that's the only thing you listen to this holiday season, you'll be fine.
Oh, and the worst Christmas song? That would be “Feliz Navidad," of course.
Tony Are is a writer, critic, and occasional musician who lives in New York City. He started playing in bands in 1967 and finally gave up in 2003. Now he sits in a rocking chair and tells the young whippersnappers how much better it used to be in his day. His poetry is at http://tonyare.weebly.com/index.html.
Previous Posts by this Author: Does the Beach Boys' "Smile" Live Up to its Reputation?
My Niece Was Right About Tyler the Creator
Trackbacks (0)
