A Little Grinchy

Rachel Phelps: [As "Wild Thing" starts to play and the crowd reacts] I hate this fucking song.

—Major League (1989)
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Now that Thanksgiving is over and we're moving into high gear on Christmas, of course it means that we're going to be hearing a lot of Christmas music.

What that means is that we'll hear about nineteen million permutations of about twenty different songs. The fact is, when you put on the "All Christmas All the Time" radio station (and there's at least one in every town; some of them started with that format weeks ago), the song catalogue just isn't that deep.

Many years ago, there was an AM station in New York City, WNEW-AM. They stood at 1130 on your dial and their format was old standards. It wasn't the "Music of Your Life", which was beamed by satellite to all the affiliates; they had DJs who programmed the shows and you got a lot of the Big Band sound, with Jazz vocalists and American standards, that sort of thing. (In fact, WNEW was the station that invented the DJ.) And every day at noon, the DJ, a fellow named William B. Williams, who had a show called "The Make-Believe Ballroom", would play the song Stardust.

Every day. Without repeating a recording unless he felt like it. For years.

This is what it's like listening to an All-Christmas station. The same few songs by all kinds of different artists. But there are a few songs that just plain irritate me:

• The Chipmunks Christmas song is one of the worst offenders. This song just makes my teeth hurt, and its popularity, which goes back to before I was born, is inexplicable. It's basically a one-joke novelty song, and the same joke gets repeated later on, in case you didn't catch the hilarity the first time around. We get it, Dave: Alvin doesn't pay attention. Give the little rodent some Ritalin and be done with it, already. The only bright note to all this is that nobody bothers to cover it because A) nobody is going to do the Chipmunk schtick, and B) there's really only one verse to the song without the schtick. Although that didn't stop Eurythmics from cutting "Sweet Dreams", did it?
  
• "My Favorite Things", the song from The Sound of Music, somehow turned into a Christmas song when this 1965 album by The Supremes came out (this is the CD cover, hence the "bonus tracks"). It's not a bad rendition of the song; in fact many of the tracks on this album are pretty good. But then again, all of the other songs on the album are Christmas songs. Not so much this one. And it might not be so bad if they stuck to the Supremes' rendition, but no. Other artists are starting to creep into the Christmas pantheon of "My Favorite Things." Just step away from the Rodgers & Hammerstein, please. And remember where you heard it first.

     

Damn right.










 

• Speaking of music that's been shoehorned into Christmas, someone's taken Pachelbel's Canon in D and added a children's choir with some Christmas lyrics to it. So you get the Canon plus the kids, then the Canon by itself, then the Canon and the kids again. None of which gets around the fact that it wasn't a Christmas song in the first place, so just cut it out. If you want to do something new, then do something new. If you want to re-do an existing Christmas song, nobody's stopping you. But don't do bogus mashups like this. Not on my watch, boy.

• Before you jump too ugly on me about "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer", let me start by saying that I rather like this song. What I object to is the specific recording that we hear over and over again. When the song first started to break, in 1982, it was on a 45-rpm record, on a label called "Oink". By 1984 it was a nationwide novelty hit and CBS signed Elmo & Patsy Shropshire (that's their last name; don't say you don't learn stuff here) to a contract, and they re-recorded the song that year. The 1982 recording, to my ear, was MUCH funnier, because it was done in such a deadpan style. They basically trusted you to get the joke. The 1984 CBS recording, which is what we are now "treated" to, is a much "wackier" recording, where Elmo will punch up certain lines (note the heavy emphasis on the "You can say" part of the chorus and the overenunciation of "incriminating Claus marks"), which is the verbal equivalent of an elbow to the ribs. The hell of it is, I had a copy of the Oink 45 and I can't find it.
• 

  I'm sure everyone and his brother has seen this video, which is a set of about 16,000 Christmas lights synchronized to "Wizards of Winter" by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I don't actually have much problem with this one either, although I'll mention that I heard it today on the radio and it's not as cool a tune without seeing the synchronized lights at the same time. They really complement each other well. 

And here's where I borrow a page from Yellojkt's playbook and get into some Blatant Comment Whoring^TM: Agree? Disagree? Anything you'd like to see banished?

Comments

[Courtney]

That friggin' donkey song makes me want to kill people.

Starting Saturday, there will be GOOD Christmas music up on my site every day until Christmas.

[yellojkt]

I cannot stand that [email protected] Grandma song under any circumstances. I need to go to my iTunes and delete it.

I like Christmas because its about the only time I hear The Waitresses on the radio, even if it's just "Christmas Rapping."

[epiph]

My biggest pet peeve in Christmas music is hearing a version of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" that sanitizes the lyrics from "Through the years /
We all will be together /
If the Fates allow /
Until then we'll have to /
muddle through somehow/
And have yourself/
A merry little Christmas now."

to

"Through the years /
We all will be together /
If the Fates allow /
Hang a shining star /
upon the highest bough./
And have yourself/
A merry little Christmas now."

It's such a beautiful, heart-wrenching song, and that lyric change that some artists do just kills me. Totally changes the song. You've got to listen to the original Garland version to really appreciate it.

I've blogged about it before. I might have to do it again, make it an annual tradition.

[Claude]

Courtney: Donkey song?

Yello: You really have to hear the earlier "Grandma" recording. He's so deadpan that you can't help but laugh. I love The Waitresses as well, which (I think) means we're old.

Epiph: I remember that post and agree with you about the way it changes the song's intent. However, I can't help but love Bing Crosby's rendition even if it's the wrong verse.

[Marian]

I know the donkey song. "Dominic the Donkey"......awful song.

I love Snoopy vs. the Red Baron, the Christmas one.
I'd like it more if it weren't exactly the same song as its predecessor, with new lyrics, but yeah, that one's pretty good.--C