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.”
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.
In Scratchbomb days of yore, I used to write one post around this time every year about terrible holiday garbage. I actually love the holidays and many holiday-related things, but there are certain aspects of it that cut through me like a knife. Only a few of them are Lexus ads.
This year, I realized there’s so much hideousness to go around that I could do a post a day until Xmas covering bad holiday junk. Kind of like an Advent calendar of hate. Today’s inaugural entry: Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart.
I’ve softened in my opinion of Robert Zimmerman over the years. Time was, I reflexively hated him because I lumped him in with hippies (who I still think are some of the worst human beings on the planet) and dismissed him without actually having heard much of his music. But then I wound up listening to other artists who love him, so I eventually came to respect him as a songwriter and personality. He’s one of those rare artists who gets to do whatever he wants, and has little or no interest in anyone else’s opinion of his work (see also: Neil Young).
But even if a person is a genius, that doesn’t mean everything they’ve done is a genius product. Dylan has issued a few clunkers in his career (Self Portrait, the out-of-nowhere born again albums). And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but he’s gotten a little weird lately.
Based on his recent career decisions, I’ve gotten the distinct impression that Dylan’s latest quest is to become a sort of Leon Redbone/Tom Waits hybrid. Playing vaguely old timey music in a fedora and suit while sporting a John Waters mustache, cultivating a disheveled, semi-inebriated persona. His arrest in Long Branch this past summer after being mistaken for a vagrant was in line with this theory.
What really convinced me that Dylan was headed in this direction was his recently-released holiday album, Christmas in the Heart. To be fair, they’re certainly not the worst Christmas songs I’ve ever heard, and 100% of Dylan’s album royalties go toward world hunger-related charities, so at least it was done for a good cause.
But I would contend that no artist as respected and worshiped as Dylan has put out such a Monkey Wrench Album as this one. A Monkey Wrench Album is a collection fans have to convince themselves is worthy among placement with his best work. At least the aforementioned clunkers have their partisans or defenders. Now, Dylan apologists have the unenviable task of trying to place Christmas in the Heart alongside Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde.
Have you heard Bruce Springsteen’s hideous song “Outlaw Pete” from his last album? Imagine an entire album of that, with Dust Bowl instrumentation, and you’ve got Christmas in the Heart. Add in Dylan’s reedy, scraggly voice and you’ve got good ol’ fashioned nightmare fuel. With Dylan’s pipes, it doesn’t matter what he’s actually saying; he’ll always sound like he wants you to get in the back of his van. The weirdest part of it is, I think that’s exactly what he wants to sound like. And why not? He’s really good at it.
The video for “Must Be Santa ” should give you an idea of the album’s aesthetic. When you go to a holiday party at Dylan’s house (which, on the inside, vaguely resembles the Parkers’ house in A Christmas Story), make sure to show up in your finest Jazz Age duds. Also know that some guy will start a fight, throw crystal at people, swing on a chandelier, and throw himself out a window. All while Dylan himself appears and disappears at will, looking like a more decrepit version of Eric Stoltz in True Romance.
But keep in mind, this is easily–easily–the best song on the album. For its true horror, you have to delve into tracks like “Here Comes Santa Claus”, given sinister new meaning by Dylan’s ruined croak. And when he sings “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, I imagine he’s saying it to distract you while he clubs you in the back of the head and drags you into a ditch.
Look: Dylan’s an icon and, again, this album is totally for charity. But his voice on these songs is like wrapping a candy cane in razor wire and shoving it down your ear canal. The only reason this album hasn’t zipped onto the top of my Holiday Hate List is because it’ll help alleviate world hunger. Not just through the funds it raises, but because it will also nauseate everyone forced to hear it.