Scary Ghost Stories - Now for Christmas!
So, I have nothing against Christmas music, just because they play it EVERYWHERE and ALL THE TIME - it actually puts me in a festive mood and I'm thankful for that...
But there are a few things I don't get... there's a song - "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" - that song is atrocious, obnoxious and every other "...ous" that you can come up with (except the good ones, like precious... or goodous or whatever...) And I'm not just talking everything that came after Andy Williams version - any version, even the original. It's not the version, it's just a badly written song... It's just a list of stuff randomly put together - of Christmas-y type things - and then there's this gem of a line... (fast forward to 0:55 second mark):
I also don't get "tales of past glories..." Like, "Hey, remember that time we had to defend the North Pole from the Mongols?" or "Remember when we won WWII? My unit was all but wiped out when we took Iwo Jima... Yeah, I thought Christmas would be a good time to talk about it..."
But seriously, what kind of twisted Christmas tradition is scary ghost stories? Unless you're referring specifically to "A Christmas Carol" - and I feel like the songwriters were like "Oh, we don't want any trouble with the Dickens people, so maybe it's best that we don't name the book outright, we'll just refer to it tangent-ically..."
And not only that, but how many other scary ghost stories Christmas stories are out there? Maybe they're just talking about the Muppets version... The Donald Duck version... The Jim Carey version?? - The problem is I'm pretty sure the song predates all of those... I could be wrong...
(Sidenote: I saw the Jim Carey version of A Christmas Carol and I only have one question: why did they feel the need to rip off Ghosts of Girlfriends Past with a slight gender bend?)
This is something else that really baffles me about Christmas music: Barbara Streisand has a Christmas album - now, I'm not mad at Babs, but is it just me or are more than half of her movies, and where she derived a good bit of her international fame, based on her being Jewish? Check out the track listing for her Christmas album (titled, BTW, rather cryptically, "A Christmas Album")
Jingle Bells
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
The Christmas Song
White Christmas
My Favorite Things
The Best Gift
Silent Night
Ave Maria
O Little Town of Bethlehem
I Wonder As I Wander
The Lord's Prayer
Now, again, I recognize that you don't have to believe in Christmas to want to make money, or, even on a more Polyannish plane, to appreciate and want to recreate and spin the music, but come on - couldn't Babs have thrown in a "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" or a "I Have a Little Candle" or a "Oh Hanukkah" or even "The Hanukkah Song" (or, more recently, this little number by one Orrin Hatch, that caused this little number by Max Weinberg and the Tonight Show crew...)
Anyway, just something to think about...
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
1 comments:
I have no idea what the Orin Hatch thing is, and the last two links didn't work for me. :-( I'm with you on the scary ghost stories thing, though. I've never understood taht.
Post a Comment