If this is the best the blogosphere can muster as a critique of Christmas music, then maybe the luddites are on to something:
I happened to tune in to a few minutes of O’Reilly today, and sure enough, he was blathering on and on and on about some poor school principal in Massachusetts whose life he planned to turn into a living hell because school rules in her town don’t allow kids to sell manger scenes at the holiday gift sale. (Something like that, anyway. I tuned in a little late to get the whole grim story.) But look: isn’t secular holiday music something we can all agree on? I mean, it sucks. It really does. If O’Reilly could dump the whole War on Christmas schtick and instead take up a War on Christmas Music, it would be a bipartisan joy for all.
This was written by Kevin Drum for MotherJones.com, and he’s figured out that the problem with secular Christmas music is that it sucks, and “Frosty the Snowman” and “Jingle Bell Rock” are the worst offenders. What’s wrong with them? They suck. I wish I could say that there’s something valuable or explanatory that I’ve omitted so that we’d have a little more to chew on here, but feel free to scour Drum’s original and see if I missed something. Since I’m fascinated by Christmas music (as you’ll see next issue), I’d love to see a thoughtful critique of Christmas music. Instead, we got “it sucks.”
Not significantly better is this list of the 12 worst Christmas songs. As is so often the case in such lists, the choices are easy, the criticisms are cheap and smartass from the “Everything’s Stupid” School of Criticism. I harbor doubts about No Doubt’s “Oi to the World” and Snoop’s “A Pimp’s Christmas Song” – haven’t heard either, to be fair – but Jim Allen takes a shot at Aaron Neville’s “O Little Town of Bethlehem” for his “dyspectic warble.” Gosh, yes Neville does have an unusual vocal style. He also rips Lou Rawls’ “Little Drummer Boy” for trying to make it swing instead of abandoning the song altogether (Lou’s Christmas tracks are some of the great, underrated Christmas recordings, even when he performs less-loved songs such as “Little Drummer Boy”), and naturally, Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart gets kicked. He writes:
It’s impossible to narrow this one down to just one track. If he’d simply made some rootsy, Dad-rock holiday album it would have merely been dull, but when he inexplicably decided to fulfill his completely unironic desire to be the Pat Boone of singer/songwriters for an entire album, Dylan found a whole sleighful of new ways to spell “fail.”
Reading that, you can almost feel the self-satisfaction that accompanies writing “Dad-rock” and “sleighful of new ways to spell ‘fail’.” Of course, the criticism pretty thoroughly misses the album, but at least it’s superficial in the same way that making fun of Aaron Neville’s voice and anyone who sings “Little Drummer Boy” is superficial.
What makes a good Christmas song for Allen? Irony, guardedness and misery, for the most part. In his list of “12 Christmas Cuts That Don’t Suck,” he includes the Kinks’ “Father Christmas” (“Ray Davies giving Santa a good kicking at the hands of some sassy street kids”), the Pogues’ “Fairy Tale of New York” (“the greatest anti-love duet ever”), the Everly Brothers’ “Christmas Eve Can Kill You” (“a lonesome Christmastime trek to nowhere for nobody”) and Chip Taylor’s “Christmas in Jail,” which he describes as a “Willie Nelson-with-a-hangover tune about a man behind bars on 12/25 due to a DWI conviction.”
A lot of that list is pretty fine – I now want to hear the Everlys track – but the lists and Allen’s writing only confirm one of my basic theories about Christmas music. Rock doesn’t tend to make good Christmas music because a concern for “cool” is in rock’s DNA – for the better – and the emotions and sentiments connected to Christmas run counter to that. Unfortunately, that obsession with cool is multiplied exponentially in fans and some critics, producing, easy, cheap laffs in lists like that.
