What Christmas song do you absolutely and unequivocally hate with all the possible passion God has granted to your Earthly existence? Put it in the comments. For my part, I despise pretty much all secular Christmas music but every time I hear Andy Williams or anybody else sing "It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year," I die a little more inside.
21 comments:
Even the "Staples" version?
All of them.
Santa's coming in a whirlybird (Gene Autry).
"The Christmas Shoes". It's so over-the-top treacly and maudlin it drives me nuts.
But like you, I pretty much despise all secular holiday music. I especially hate hearing "Christmas" music during Advent!
I liked Little Drummer Boy the first 40 or 50 that I heard it. Now, eh! Not so much.
"times"
Holly Jolly Christmas (though there are many very close seconds). I am fond of, when it comes on in grocery stores, the one place I can't totally avoid for these weeks, pantomiming drawing and pulling the slide on a 1911 and "shooting out the loudspeaker".
My all time least favorite Christmas tune wasn't really a Christmas song but I remember it being played ad nauseam just before Christmas of '86 or '87 on our local (central IL) radio stations.
It was a song called "Dear Mr. Jesus" about a little girl who wrote a letter to Jesus asking if he could please get her dad to stop drinking and beating her and mom, and by the way, could he also get mom to stop hitting her too? It was supposed to be a fundraiser for child abuse awareness. Well, the first couple of times I heard it I was kinda touched. The fifth time, less so. The 10th or 20th time, even less. The 100th time I heard it I wanted to fling a rock at the radio. Then it (thankfully) dropped off the face of the earth and I haven't heard it since. Anyone else remember it?
Agree about the secular stuff. Give me medieval and renaissance carols.
My home supermarket has been playing really awful music for a a couple of weeks now. It's the old, awful, secular stuff done anew by terrible musicians. I couldn't work there during this season. At least Perry Como and Dean Martin could SING.
"Mary, Did You Know?" Gag. Sputter. Shudder.
Burl Ives, Chipmunks, you name it.
"It's Cold Outside" always sucked and the revised Social Justice version is worse.
"Holly, Jolly Christmas" is way up there, damn close, but, ITKMOTOFY still takes down the anti-Christmas pot in terms of driving me up a damned wall.
None of them, really. Lots of mass entertainment (some of which graduates to popular culture) is unpalatable, but it doesn't usually merit an intensely visceral reaction (rap is so hideous that it does merit such a reaction). I rather like Andy Williams, though I've never collected his music and don't have an investment in that particular song.
I've never much cared for Christmas carols and the like, bar two (God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Carol of the Bells). Forty years ago or so, it was common where I grew up for groups of people to go house to house 'caroling', but the last time I can recall encountering a pack of Christmas carolers was around 1993.
Liturgical music should be plainchant (or, in certain discrete venues, polyphony). We did attend a performance of Messiah this year and sometimes attend lessons-and-carols.
"It's Cold Outside" always sucked
Nothing wrong with the song as a musical piece. However, it's...suggestive. A few years back, a video of two youngsters lip-synching the song in a choreographed routine shot in a hotel lobby appeared. (Michael Buble and some dame provided the actual vocals). Evidently, that was quite well received. Not sure why. No way to make an 11 year old boy and a 12 year old girl graceful and having a tween who needs orthodontic work mouthing the lyrics of a song about seduction is ... let's just say odd and de trop.
The one I've never liked, not even once, is John Lennon's "So This Is Christmas". I just sigh and roll my eyes as soon as I hear the opening line. Nothing to do with Christianity, just the usual "Let's all luuuuuuuuv each other" for no discernable reason at all.
This is the same John Lennon who wrote
Imagine there's no heaven ...
Yeah, that one's pretty darn close to the top of my to-don't list.
"Nothing wrong with the song as a musical piece."
Nope. Sucks there too.
Nope. Sucks there too.
It's a perfectly unremarkable piece of period music. You don't like that genre, OK. It's not a notably deficient example of the genre.
I might make exceptions for the stuff they included in Die Hard, the greatest of Christmas movies. But for the most part, all secular Christmas music sucks royally.
But for the most part, all secular Christmas music sucks royally.
It's usually a subset or derivative of 'traditional pop'. Traditional pop's not for everyone, and, like any genre, it's of uneven quality. We sent away many years ago for some Time-Life CD sets of music organized by decade. In re the discs covering the 1940s and 1950s, we listened once and forgot about them. Were you expecting Sinatra and Dinah Shore, think again. Oodles of schlock were produced at that time, and it's not difficult listening to it to get a sense of how engaging someone like Richie Valens must have seemed if you'd heard this other stuff on the radio for 10 years. Now, the phenomenon can be interesting from what you might call an anthropological perspective: what did people hear in Johnny Ray's voice?
Post a Comment