So the next work day, while tired old crooners were barfin’ the beige out of the speakers, I took a survey of my first 100 customers to see whether they enjoyed Christmas music in public settings like this. We finally got the last, clueless, terrified shopper out of the store, did a final check of the aisles, the shift manager come on the loud speaker and truimphantly declare “We are customer free!”, a cheer went up, and then a treacly, barf-ridden version of “Jingle Bells” descended over the store. One year it started the second we closed the doors on Thanksgiving day, thanks to a prankster of an Assistant Manager upstairs. When I worked at Whole Foods the Xmas Crap started the day after Thanksgiving. The beigiest barfiest Xmas song ever had bonded us all as survivors of having to hear that steamy turd. But then, an unintended Christmas miracle! By the end of the song all of us employees and all of the customers were standing, speechless and bug-eyed, staring at the hidden speaker in the ceiling, united in slack-jawed disbelief. The singer was really trying to mine some Soul out of this, but lacked the chops for what was an impossible task to begin with.
It was like if a group of Franciscan monks took a slow motion stab at “Yellow Submarine”.įe-liz…….Navi…………daaaad……………. Now imagine that ditty slooooowed down to slower than “Imagine” tempo. Think about how impossibly stupid that song is (sorry Jose Feliciano!), and that the only good thing about it is that its fast and over with quickly.
When I worked at the Hot Tub place we had to listen to crap carols and one time Sirius XM decided to play us an earnest, yearning, ballad version of "Feliz Navidad". But that doesn’t mean we have to like their taste. Humans evolved as hunters who succeed at catching prey, and Christmas Carols are some of the catchiest fare to get caught in our cerebral snares. We know them so well because some primitive part of our brain - evolving before the receptors for “taste” - LOVES these melodies. Why? WHY? Why do we love/hate this music so much? Because the songs themselves are some of the best, most airtight melodies ever concocted. It was ALL THERE, more than 100 years ago. The same titles we know and “love” - the same syrupy arrangements - the same plodding crooners searching for MEANING in “O Christmas Tree” - the same forced saccharine gaiety on “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”. You could buy the shellac 78rpm discs at the Montgomery Wards in town, take them home via the family horse, put one on the Victrola, and CLEAR THE ROOM as your family fled from the parlor. And guess what? All the hoary old Christmas songs were already there, springing fully-formed into this new medium. I am a fan of oooold music, from the earliest days of recordings, starting from the first decade of the 20th Century. And then it gets put away for another year.īut the dreck and tripe that your local streaming service’ll serve up: Barf. I make a playlist every year and play it while we set up the Community Seed Yule Social party. On the one hand, I am the KING of novelty tunes, and own a good 24 hours of the funniest, filthiest, metallist, most irony-laden Standards ever. Witness, cinco de mayo.īut Thanksgiving stubbornly continues to be about family and tryptophan.Ĭhristmas is about those things too, but with an added layer of corporate candy and business booze ladled on top.Ĭhristmas also has a mutant offspring of a music tradition, stretching back for the entire history of recording. Every other holiday has been kidnapped by the Advertising goblins and turned into a festival of either:Īnd in some cases, holidays were pretty much made up, to further pad the bottom line while we puke into our hats. Thanksgiving is the best holiday of all, because it is all about food and fellowship - and there is NO SOUNDTRACK for it.
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