Monthly Archives: December 2009

Holiday Horrors 2009

Holiday Horrors: “Christmas Shoes”

For other Holiday Horrors posts, click here.

Have you never heard “Christmas Shoes”? If so, I envy you. I remember a time when that song didn’t exist. Things seemed so simple. People seemed to laugh more back then.

This song was crafted from an aggressively dumb, particularly American take on spirituality. Namely, that other people’s tragedies exist for the sole purpose of making other more fortunate people realize how good they have it. And there is a loving, caring god who steers us toward these moments–even though He doesn’t see fit to steer the victims away from their gruesome fates.

What kind of passive aggressive deity would do that? Seriously, if you take five seconds to think through the true implications of such a God ruling and directing the universe, how on earth could you believe in Him? Unless you prescribe to some weird sort of spiritual masochism. It’s a variation on the Jack T. Chick brand of Christianity, in which God doesn’t do anything to quell the misery and want found on Earth, but can’t wait to throw sinners into Hell the second they die.

There are literally thousands of things wrong with this song, on so many levels: musically, philosophically, and theologically. It would take a novel to run through them all. Luckily, Patton Oswalt has done that in less than eight minutes in the video below, accompanied by some excellent animation. (Thanks to TheWhiteBoomBoom for pointing me toward this.)

Holiday Horrors 2009

Holiday Horrors: “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)”

For other Holiday Horrors posts, click here.

As I alluded to in my previous post, John Lennon bugs me. For a long time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why he bothered me so much. But then I finally figured it out: He thought he had all the answers.

This is the big theme running through his songs: “I’ve figured out what’s going on this little mudball called Earth. If all of you simpletons would just chill out and follow me, you’d all be so much happier.” They all point an accusing finger at the rest of humanity, and never at himself. Anyone who questioned him was just some square who didn’t vibrate to the same magic wavelength as he and Yoko.

Instant karma’s gonna get you. Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can. If you just sat here and watched the wheels with me, everything would seem so simple, man!

I know that a lot of his attitude can be attributed to his troubled upbringing, that it was a product of insecurity and abandonment issues. Even so, he often sounds less like a musical genius and more like a Jim Jones-esque cult leader.

It’s even apparent in his relatively benign holiday song, “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)”. Musically, it’s better than Sir Paul’s Yuletide tune. But lyrically, like a lot of Lennon’s songs, it has a huge chip on its shoulder.

First line of the song: So this is Christmas/And what have you done? “I don’t know what you did for Christmas, but I’ve recorded a classic holiday song that people will sing 30 years from now. Because I’m a giver. What did you do with your holiday season, huh? Probably just bought a buncha presents and drank egg nog, huh? You make me sick.”

And the refrain War is over/If you want it. “Look folks, I’ve done all the work already. I could make war stop tomorrow in a snap. But you have to want it. I guess you assholes just don’t want it bad enough. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go on a journey of introspection and self discovery. Or maybe just check out for a while and get toasted with Harry Nilsson.”

Holiday Horrors 2009

Holiday Horrors: “Wonderful Christmastime”

For other Holiday Horrors posts, click here.

I like Paul McCartney a lot. He’s my favorite Beatle. I think he gets a bad rap merely for outliving John Lennon (who drives me up the wall, as we shall get into in a future post), but I think his solo stuff is much, much better than John’s (if you’re willing to ignore some of Paul’s most glaring clunkers, which I admit is hard to do at times). He’s still out there doing it, and whatever criticisms you can make of his newer material, you can’t say
he’s coasting and putting out lazy retreads.

Notwithstanding George Harrison picking up the sitar and Lennon enabling Yoko’s screeching, Paul has always been the most musically adventurous of the Fab Four. Sometimes musical adventurousness leads to brilliance like side 2 of Abbey Road. But sometimes it leads to early adoption of questionable new technology, as Sir Paul did in his 1979 holiday tune “Wonderful Christmas Time”. Back then, polyphonic synthesizers were in their infancy, and Macca decided he needed to get in on the ground floor of the impending beep-boop revolution.

So he performed most of the song on a (then) brand new keyboard, the Prophet-5. In 1979, it must have seemed very futuristic, since it had a lot of knobs and dials and allowed you to play five whole notes at once. But then again, so did the original Battlestar Galactica and Space Invaders. With the Beatles, McCartney made timeless music, but this song is definitely the product of a very specific timeframe–and should have stayed there.

Unfortunately, this tune has received an undeserved revival in the past few years. I never heard this song as a kid, and then all of a sudden it reemerged from the depths of Moog-ville five or six years ago. I think much of its renewed appreciation is ironic, from a generation that thinks huge cell phones and dial-up modems are hysterical.

Truth be told, this song is not that bad at its core. From a pure musical standpoint, it’s not great, but it’s not terrible either. It’s cute, inoffensive, even fun at times. Unfortunately, to get to this core you have to wave through a chorus of toy laser guns. If Nerf made instruments, this is what they would sound like.

Some people dig vintage synthesizers. These people are insane. Maybe nostalgia gives you a soft spot for Atari, but deep in your heart you know it pales in comparison to the PS3. Preferring the synthesizers of 1979 to today’s models is like preferring an outhouse to indoor plumbing.

I hope someday McCartney decides to re-record this with a real band. Or at least with instruments that don’t sound like miked styrofoam.