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The Ultimate Christmas Album
🕑 Added 2020-12-18 20:09:13 +0000 UTCSurprise! My grinchlike dislike for Christmas has yielded two separate anti-Christmas works this December. Huzzah!
Modern christmas music really is the pits-- you either get:
1) pathetic attempts to remix and remake Christmas classics like Jingle Bells, songs with tunes and rhythm so old and shitty that no amount of synthesizer can save it
2) Cringey attempts by major musicians to create a new modern original hit, people like The Strokes or Foster The People coming out with songs called like "Just another New York Christmas" which almost universally end up bombing (with few exceptions-- All I Want For Christmas Is You is the big one. But are there any other worth noting that have emerged in the past two decades? )
3) Even cringier ironic, goofy Christmas songs that retain the musical aesthetics of holiday cheer but are about drinking too much on Christmas and barfing, or accidentally shooting Santa in the head or jacking off alone in your apartment on Christmas eve. Weird Al already basically nailed this with "The Night Santa Went Crazy" so every other big name rock group who thinks their too cool to make a Christmas song in earnest can just pack their shit up and stop before they embarrass themselves.
I'm not remotely religious, but at least the older, heavily religious Christmas songs have some serious weight and earnesty behind them. What is modern-day Christmas about? What do we believe in? Spending time with family? Giving people joy? Nobody actually believes that. It's a chore for everyone involved save the youngest of kids and the eldest of parents (desperate for an arbitrary reason to force their kids into actually spending some time with their poor old family for once). Just a complete farce.
That being said, I would listen to a Christmas album if Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails put one out-- the whirr of industrial machinery replaced with toymaking factory mechanisms, wooden hammers and ringing sleigh bells, the lyrics delving into the psyche of a man tormented by the vapidity of the modern holiday, confronting its meaninglessness the way that songs like 'Heresy' confront atheism and the death of God. A Mr. Bungle holiday album would also be fun.
What do you think? Are there any good Christmas songs that you think could change my mind?
Comments
quby
i think as a lower rent pop christmas tune ariana grande's "santa tell me" aint bad
Billy Wright
Sufjan Stevens' "Hey Guys! It's Christmastime!" and the Christmas album by Low both do it for me in terms of original compositions
cybercommunism
I think all of Sufjan's Christmas songs are the only exception I can tolerate, he makes them so wistful and plaintive and basically puts the emotion back into them that has been drained by the decades of soulless repetition for its own sake. He also has some good originals, like, "That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!" which also do the kind of contrarian "christmas is bad actually" but again in what feels like a much more sincere way.
billy likes balloons
Absolutely nailed it with this one bean man! All Christmas songs are manically happy fake nice bullshit. Christmas always brings out the worst in people.
