Here it is, Christmas Eve, and I've exceeded thirty songs this year...but it doesn't look like I will complete the goal of forty. It's enough for me to be encouraged to embark on a 2012 cycle, and I will once again add the shortfall to the total. I will conquer this thing yet...
And here's the third of our Christmas Novelty Songs--hell, it's a cover of a Christmas Novelty Song that I cited in my last entry as The Last Great Perennial Christmas Single.
Idiot Glee is from Kentucky, and are apparently the alter-ego of James Friley. Idiot Glee has also apparently made it a habit to produce a Christmas covers EP ever year; this rendition of the Wham! UK cover is from their first, An Idiot Glee Christmas. The female vocalist you hear is Ashley Crawford...and I guess as a cover, it's okay. It really doesn't do much to make it stand out. There is the sleigh bells, the Casiotone synth does give it a strange, swirly feel that's at turns very open and very claustrophobic, and Crawford's vocals have an odd quality all their own--when the male vocals come in for harmonic support, they're very startling...and to be fair, they also serve to give the rendition a slim golden chain-like anchor to that original 1980's version.
I don't know what else to say. As I was saying to a friend yesterday, the biggest reason who so many people (you know, like me) have grown to loathe Christmas music is that there are these three dozen or so songs that have been ossified into an Acceptable Holiday Canon...and musicians have spent literally decades just picking from this Canon and reworking them with only minimal exertion of creativity. And that's what Mr. Friley has done.
Incidentally, the EP is still available for a dollar here.
Sorry our little sidetrip into Christmas Music didn't end on a more epic note...but maybe next year....
No video for this one...but here's Mr. Friley and Ela Orleans from the same EP collaborating on the 'delightful' Christmas paen to Date Rape, "Baby It's Cold Outside."
When your lead singer's previous band was named after her
middle name....well, you know who wears the pants in
this one, right?
Hey, look! I managed to break thirty this year! There might be hope left after all....
...and we're back to the Holiday Novelty Song--well, kinda. Unlike our last dip into this pool, which tried to make its way onto the perennial Holidays Playlist by doing a paen to an end-of-the-year festival that isn't Christmas, this one tries to crack that list by giving us a song that makes Christmas incidental.
And make no bones about it--in the last handful of years, there's a lot of these Christmas-Songs-That-Aren't, usually presented by these pop rock bands that sprung up in the wake of the Disney-sponsored Tweener-pop revolution. These are songs that are for all extents just plain ol' songs addressing the usual pop music themes--I Miss My Significant Other; I Love My Significant Other; I Wish To Have Physical Intercourse With My Significant Other; I Am Going To Use Metaphor To Describe An Incident of Physical Intercourse With My Significant Other--and sprinkles in references to mistletoe and Christmas decorations and caroling to convince us that yes, this is a Christmas song. Now granted, this mode of attack has produced successes in the past--an argument can be made that the Last Great Perennial Holiday Single was 'Last Christmas,' which is the prototype for all these songs, The Killers have made a cottage industry out of doing these strange and dark Christmas singles that seem more about mayhem than the holidays, and one of my favorites songs from the emocore band Something Corporate is 'Forget December.' But sometimes you get, well, 'Without You.'
There are too many jokes I could make about this photo,
and all of them would be inappropriately rude...
Hey Monday, the Florida band that has given us 'Without You' has only been around since 2008, have only been recording since last year and boy, do they want to be Paramore badly. Just like Paramore, Hey Monday builds its image around its lead singer and guitarist, Cassadee Pope. And Pope is striving so hard to be a clone of Hayley Williams, it's not even funny....except that her attempts to fashion her image thusly has resulted in her coming off more Ashley Simpson (remember how she liked to proclaim that she was a 'rock chick' during that brief period when pop culture treated her singing aspirations seriously?) than Williams, or Avril Lavinge, or any of a dozen pop-rockettes that have come down the pike. If anything, Pope is a lumpen Plasticine statuette of a pop punk diva, something kids draw in their art classes when asked to draw a rock band.
As for the band itself....in spite of their posturings (which includes the self-conscious 'radical' misspellings of the band members' names, and the weird fetishization of Pope's tattoos by their fans), Hey Monday comes off as the sort of band that's featured on a Disney Channel sitcom because, you know, Paramore rocks too hard.
'Without You' is from an entire EP of Christmas songs called, imaginatively, The Christmas EP. And the fascinating thing? There are four songs. One is a cover of 'O Holy Night.' Of the three originals, only one ('Mixtape For Christmas') bothers to mention Christmas or anything Christmas-y in the title. And those originals use Christmas not as an inspiration, but as a backdrop. Take the references to snow and mistletoe out of 'Without You,' and you still have a pop song that's perfectly workable. And there's something sad about that. I may be a pretty cynical bastard when it comes to Christmas, but at least I know that when I sit down to watch something yule-ish, I want it to actually have a whiff of the Season to it. Listening to this, all I can think of is that Pope wants to be Hayley Williams, and she wants to have her generation's version of 'Last Christmas' under her belt. And she fails on both counts.
Every year I see more and more of these kind of songs. And it saddens me because I see it as a further indication that in most people's mind Christmas has drifted so far away from the things it was supposed to represent and more about the trappings. And I can't see this trend stopping in the future.
And as I try to race to the end to minimize the amount of bleed over for 2012...our first Holiday Novelty Song.
The Holiday Novelty Song has a long and storied history--after all, what is 'Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer' or 'Frosty The Snowman' but a holiday novelty song that has drifted into the realm of The Standard? Of course, what fascinates me are those novelty songs that become perennials but never quite break through to Standard status; here in New York, every Christmas time we are tormented with repeated playings of 'Dominick The Christmas Donkey,' the saga of the donkey Santa uses to bring toys to the children of Italy sung by Lou Monte but apparently never getting much traction outside of the tri-state area.
To be honest, it is amazing to me how many of these songs do end up clawing their way into the playlists of lazy radio stations everywhere. Every year we get dozens, if not hundreds of songs from various artists bidding for the same sort of immortality Frosty and Rudolph and That Reindeer That Ran Over Grandma have achieved...and for every 'Last Christmas' or 'Merry Christmas, Baby (Please Come Home)' or 'All I Want For Christmas Is You,' there are dozens which don't make it.
Which I guess brings us to Eric Schwartz, a.k.a. Smooth-E, an Oakland native who tries with this song to break into that hallowed holiday playlist by taking The Adam Sandler Road. Sandler guaranteed himself Holiday Novelty Immortality by sidestepping the overexposed Christmas and writing his HNS about Hanukkah. Actually, he cemented it by writing about Hannukkah three times over. And this prompted a whole group of other artists to do a little 'me, too' creating their own paens to Other Holidays That Take Place Around Christmas. As I write this, there's one artist who has actually produced an EP of Atheist Christmas Songs...no lie.
Not surprisingly, the biggest group of alternative HNS's are about the Festival of Lights, and to be fair, some of them are pretty good.
Not this one.
Mr. Schwartz, in creating his Hanukkah-themed parody of Outkast's smash hit of several years ago, falls into one of the pitfalls of the Novelty Song--namely, mistaking stereotyping for celebrating. Even thought Schwartz at one point proclaims 'Oi is just Yo backwards,' he brings nothing more to the table but a series of surface impressions of what Hanukkah is--hey, look! Menorahs! Driedels! Matzoh Balls! Latkes!'...and ending with the whole 'hey, we get eight nights of presents compared to you guys' getting one'...a point made better by, among other people, Adam Sandler in the songs that started this all.
Here is the video, which is just as cheap and surface as the song itself (Hey, look! These jews are accountants!). My apologies...
And here's the third of our Christmas Novelty Songs--hell, it's a cover of a Christmas Novelty Song that I cited in my last entry as The Last Great Perennial Christmas Single.
