Hum for the Holidays, Vol. 00003

post brought to you by: ledyard

As most of you are aware, we are quickly approaching 2010, with the general (and I would say correct) consensus being that this is the end of the decade. For me, this is a rather dire situation, because unless something changes in the next week or two, this will be the first decade in a long time to not carry with it a signature holiday song. Although the creation of Christmas music has drastically fallen off as a viable art form since its heyday in the 40’s and 50’s, we can still find in each decade at least one or two representatives to take with us through the subsequent holidays.

90’s – Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ (and to a lesser extent Tom Petty’s “Christmas All Over Again’)

80’s – Wham’s fantastic ‘Last Christmas’ (a godsend on holiday radio, even after its 200th spin); Band-Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ (and also not an official classic by most people’s standards but still a great song, The Pogues ‘Fairy Tale of New York’)

70’s – Jose Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad”; The Carpenters’ “Merry Christmas Darling”; Paul McCartney’s seizure-inducing “Wonderful Christmastime”

60’s – Eddie Pola “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” and many others

50’s & 40’s – EVERYTHING ELSE YOU’VE EVER HEARD AT CHRISTMAS

As you can see above, there hasn’t been a true addition to the canon since 1994’s brilliant “All I Want For Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey (by true, I mean an original song that is played consistently). As I have mentioned in a previous entry, the Nog Jockeys in Atlanta (and I would guess everywhere else) seem to want to place some terrible Nick & Jessica cover (‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’) as this decade’s lowly contribution to the holiday pantheon, but as a listener, I wholly reject this. The song, as you might have guessed, is just another vanilla re-packaging, accented by the bland, breathy readings of two people who obviously don’t know music as anything more than remuneration for their work as a dying loveless couple on MTV.

So what gives? Are we really that tapped for song ideas? Is our current society that incongruent with the spirit of the holidays (‘ho ho ho’ doesn’t mean what it used to)? Can the sentimental side of music only come from a pair of unfeeling, unloving morons? It seems we may be on a two-track channel:

1. We still treat the holidays as a kind of living, recurring memory, shaped by the songs from its most productive period, the 40’s & 50’s
2. We live in a society that is absolutely nothing like that of the 40’s & 50’s, let alone the idyllic version of the 40’s and 50’s, which ironically has been shaped over the years by holiday music

The best illustration of how these two disparate tracks collide to wreak havoc on our current iteration of the holidays is in Great Britain. Since the early 70’s, the Brits have had an annual race to crown each holiday season’s #1 single. This was made fairly well known as a plot device in the film ‘Love Actually’, and for the first couple decades, it was a classic holiday tradition, with one of the more memorable battles occurring between the aforementioned ‘Last Christmas’ and ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ in 1984. Lately however, the entire enterprise has been subverted and warped, reduced to a battle between novelty songs or saccharine ballads performed by the winners of reality shows. This change has been orchestrated by Europe’s King of all Media, Simon Cowell, a man who, with his year-round presence in British television, must be wearing pretty thin with the public (at least we get a break in the states). In fact, people are getting so tired of him and what he has done to the Christmas single tradition, that a movement began this year on Facebook to dethrone his bid single (which happens to be a cover of Miley Cyrus’ ‘The Climb’…shoot me in the face). And what song did the people choose to take out this unholiest of unholies? “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine. That’s right: the one from 1992. It was a very tight, heated battle, but Rage continued to gain momentum, and just today, ‘Killing in the Name’ was crowned this year’s UK Christmas single.

What can be easily described as a heroic move this year will undoubtedly spawn an endless stream of joke movements in the years to come, much like when your high school voted “Me So Horny” to be prom theme. This move could signal the obliteration of that holiday tradition as anything but a complete and utter waste of peoples’ time and money. Is this what we want the holidays to become? Is this what our generation wants to contribute? Should we be tearing down traditions without the subsequent reformation of new ones?

The two contrasting points I mentioned above have created a rift in the creative process for current artists. On the one hand, we can no longer continue to release new singles that simply re-create the nostalgia of yesteryear, but on the other, our current mainstream music scene is seemingly one in which the holiday spirit does not reside.

In this line of thinking, there are only a couple possible solutions. We can continue to do what we’ve done for the past 30-40 years, which is to just accept a surprisingly small holiday canon of roughly 50 songs and allow that to be the soundtrack of our Decembers (1/12th of our lives, people!), while only adding parodies or subverted postmodern touches to a season that, at its core, is supposed to be dedicated to peace and love. Or we can take what has already been established, change it and add to it, reclaiming the holidays as our own experience, our own expression of what family, love, giving, and celebration mean to us.

Why must our best efforts to establish a modern holiday sound be just taking old songs and adding loud drums to them? Why is the other option to have vapid balladeers bastardize beautifully written songs that have already been performed to their maximum potential? Why don’t we hear how congruent some of our current artists are to what could very possibly be the NEW holiday experience, OUR holiday experience?

It may be funny to think about at first, but what don’t we have to create a beautiful and new holiday experience for ourselves? Can you not hear the exuberance in bands such as Passion Pit or O’Spada and think they could be instrumental in helping us celebrate the joy of the season? Do you not feel exaltation in the music of Fleet Foxes and think they could be extolling the benefits of love and peace that come with the holidays? Can you not listen to the sweet and charming goofiness that is Jens Lekman and think he has a modern day ‘Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer’ just waiting to come out?

I submit to you the notion that the holidays are not dead, that they don’t have to be a dried-out corpuscle incapable of growth and change in these very different and mercurial times. I think it’s about time we made the holidays come alive again, infusing what has already been established with the strength and spirit of the modern world. We have all the tools necessary; we just need the will.

Thanks for reading, and happy holidays.