The Constant Weader Takes a Break
... To Do Some Serious Seasonal Research ...
In Her Annual Survey of
The Worst Christmas Songs Ever
She Keeps Finding Worse Ones
Nice outfits, Twisted Sister, but a little less percussion would have been more evocative of the carols we children used to sing in school back in the day schools had Christmas pageants:
This maudlin entry is Newsweek's nomination. The group is NewSong, a Christian "rock" group. One of the singers, Eddie Carswell, wrote the song all by hisself, based on a chain letter. Kevin Fallon of Newsweek has the story for anyone writing a paper on the history of shlock. I could not listen to the song all the way through:
BUT Patton Oswalt listened for me and explains the logic of the song's narrative. He includes this theological exegis: "I died for your sins, but those pumps are unforgivable":
... Sorry, John Denver, "Christmas Shoes" beat out your perennial favorite "Please, Daddy, Don't Get Drunk This Christmas."
Apparently Lady Gaga is an acquired taste. It's difficult to imagine a more salacious "Christmas carol":
Mariah Carey gives it the old college try, but doesn't come even close. The implied pedophilia is a nice touch, though:
Speaking of kids, in case you thought you were missing something by not knowing squat about boy groups -- this video should reassure you you're way better off. I keep forgetting how totally talentless these kids are. And they told us the lip-syncing Monkeys were bad:
Really, Madonna, how could you? (It's an awful song, but Eartha Kitt at least knew what to do with it):
Somehow I don't think Clarence Carter was really into the spirit of the season (out of an abundance of kindness, I'm not embedding Jon bon Jovi's version of "Back Door Santa":
Bob Dylan's "It Must Be Santa" is so bad I run it every year, & now I've come to enjoy it, albeit in a perverse way:
AND to make up for all that, the best bank commercial in history -- produced by the Banc Sabadell & performed in Plaça de Sant Roc in Sabadell, a town north of Barcelona. Thank you once again, Ludwig:
... Contributor James S. recommends ...
... That's Clyde McPhatter & the Drifters.
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Reader Comments (9)
This would be my favorite xmas song, although the bank commercial is pretty good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddVZOK_9UUI
A therapist friend from Eugene, OR has a refinement on the NRA position: she would like to see a teacher in every gun shop.
Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat,
Please to put a penny in the old man's hat;
If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do,
If you haven't got a ha'penny, god bless you!
"By mid-century, the process of embourgeoisement was well underway. Within a very few decades, the holiday would be sanitized and feminized, leather aprons and muddy boots would be supplanted by waistcoats and crinolines, the people out of doors would be disbanded, reformed and brought to the domestic hearthside. It would be possible to dwell on the class blinders of the bourgeois Christmas. American Christmas cards, unlike their English counterparts, lacked any references to contemporary poverty. The American Christmas carols that proliferated between 1840 and 1880 (“It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” “We Three Kings,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and others) emphasized mythic resonance rather than social realism, as in the English “please put a penny in the old man’s hat.” Americans, according to Restad, preferred “music that resonated with the strains of American optimism and avoided the mire of history and social condition.” When they were confronted with the mire, they stepped nimbly aside. Consider Frank Woolworth, the department store king who made a fortune selling glass tree ornaments. On a buying trip to Lauscha, Germany, he threaded his way through the “dirty hovels” where the glassworkers and their families lived eight to a room. He was disgusted, but otherwise unmoved."
http://www.tnr.com/book/review/piety-and-plenty-commodification-of-christmas
Re; In the Spirit; Twisted Sister; documented proof, girls dig guitar slingers.
If Mommy had health care maybe she could recover and enjoy the shoes but Jesus is against welfare as all you fundies know.
Lady Gaga; nice party, save the humpback whale.
Mariah Carey; hey; leave that kid alone. Nice costume though.
Madonna; hey; leave Santa alone. Why are you always dancing with five guys?
Clarence; dude, this goes along way to explaining why the Clauses don't have children.
Mr. Dylan; I still want an invite.
Merry Christmas to all.
It's what you give not what you get.
Thank you. I sent a link to the Ode to Joy flash mob/ad to the Community String Project. Imagine 3rd - 8th graders playing violins, cellos, violas and basses as a flash mob. In just a few years we have over 90 children (and a few adults to help fund this endeavor). Bristol has a wonderful Christmas celebration. It would be perfect. Again, thank you and have a good holiday.
Can't say I agree that "O Come All Ye Faithful" is one of the worst Christmas songs. Unless you mean version. (-:
No "Buzzy, the Christmas Bee"? "Here Comes Peter Cotton Claus"? "Merry Christmas, You Suckers"?
"Christmas Shoes" is an update of a common pop ballad type from the 19th century--the most famous antecedent, possibly, is the Lightning Express, recorded by any number of people, including (to make the proper Boomer reference) The Everly Brothers. Such songs date from a period when dying mothers, drunken fathers, dying children, etc, were part of ordinary existence.
Here's one version of the Lightning Express lyrics: Please, Mr. Conductor. Recording-wise, check YouTube, where they have the Everlys, plus (probably) early 1900s recordings. Paging Vernon Dalhart.
Same bit as Shoes: poor kid, kindly conductor/customer, sick or dying mom, poor father (or none at all), act of charity. These socially-conscious pop songs were all over the place, losing their hipness c. 1920s, when such tunes became "folk" and "country" fare. Which is to say, people have been declaring themselves too sophisticated for dying-child/Mommy-going-to-the-angels lyrics for a good 90 years.
I realize Fallon's piece is mainly a fundie-bashing op, but didn't he stumble over any research in his research?
And, Kevin, Christianity is mainstream. Maybe not yours, but part of the collective version.
@Raul. It is sort of dismaying for me to take off one day a year & be criticized for what I thought was just fun -- twice. On Christmas, yet. I don't blame you for thinking I should be more consistent & do the same ole same ole 365 days (well, 366, this year) a year, & it is reasonable to expect that a person who is not a musician and/or a musicologist should keep her tastes in music to herself.
So next year if you want to do some "worst Christmas music" -- or something else -- let me know & I'll turn the site over to you. I give up.
Marie
P.S. Yeah, I think it's pretty tasteless to purposely butcher traditional Christian music, particularly pieces that make it into hymnals & are thus part of Christian masses. "Adeste fideles" was probably the only Latin clause I knew the meaning of when I was 8 years old. (My father did tell me that when he was an altar boy he thought the phrase "Dominus vobiscum" meant "Dominick, go frisk 'em," as it was said before the offertory, but I don't think he told me what "Dominus vobiscum" actually meant.) mmb
@Marie, I wasn't criticizing you or your departure from script. I'm not even sure this was a departure from script, given Kevin Fallon's predictable send-up of sentiment. As I noted, there's a long pop history of treating dying-mother, pathetic-orphan songs as unacceptably corny. I was simply citing Fallon for doing no research, for making false claims about the originality of a song as conventional as "Christmas Shoes," which presses all the country/country gospel buttons and is virtually a rewrite of a famous "old-timey" song.
I can't help doing fact-checking on a topic--pop music history--I find so important.
As a chronic site-lurker, I'm used to the ritual teasing of anything sentimental or pop-religious, esp. come the holidays. There are sites devoted to it, if not a whole Internet culture. As a result, I've become interested in the history of that shared practice--curious to discover why we label sad songs as "wrong." What I've discovered is at least a century-long trend, though it's likely older. In the early 1900s, at least, it was a rejection of 19th-century pop culture, just as we ritually ridicule all things Ozzie and Harriet.
Banishing sentiment is a repeating ritual, part of the process of pretending we've grown up, culturally, that our parents were hopelessy out of it, that people of the recent past were too dumb to tie their shoes; etc. The point being, that rebelling against the norm is the same ritual each time it forms; only the generational backdrops change. We'd be a different species if we didn't junk the past on a regular basis, or if we ever became too conscious of the fact that, in doing so, we're of one with that past.