Hark! Behold!
On Christmas music
A colleague called me a “music snob” at the company holiday party this week, or, rather, he called himself and I “music snobs,” and he meant it, I think, the way that people who are very smart about a certain topic might call themselves “[insert topic] nerd,” that is, as a sort of badge of honor. We are the ones with good taste, but that taste comes with a social burden, is the subtext. And he is not wrong. I had been asked to throw together the party playlist by another colleague, the one unofficially in charge of “party vibes,” and the whole time I was making the playlist, I had to keep reminding myself that not everyone loves the mournful, minor-key Christmas carols I love, and those are a downer at a party anyway. For example, my favorite version of “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear,” which is in no way suitable for a work party playlist in its original version, is the version by Sam Phillips in which she has transposed the song from C major to A minor, which brings forward the sorrow in the song such that the “weary road” sounds even more weary, and “life's crushing load” has some weight to it, making it even more unsuitable for a work party. (Someone should do this with “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!,” or maybe “White Christmas,” given that, for example, in New York City, we’ve gone, in a decade, from there being snow on the ground Thanksgiving through St. Patrick’s Day, to having winters where it never snows at all.) Luckily I know plenty of peppy, interesting holiday tunes, but with the exception of some songs from recent Christmas albums by Alicia Keys and Norah Jones, and one single by Khruangbin, none of the songs were newer than fifteen years old. Lots of James Brown, Vince Guaraldi, the Rat Pack, Ella Fitzgerald, the Ronnettes, the Jackson 5, Sharon Jones, Kenny Burrell, and so on (I know how to make a fun party playlist, is what I’m saying).
Even as I understood it to be a compliment, and an expression of solidarity, still I bristled at “snob,” because I think there are few things worse in terms of relating to art, than snobbery. Whether or not a song (or a painting, or a poem, or a play or a film) is “good” or “bad” has to be the most boring kind of conversation to have about art, and if there exists a universal and objective metric for “good” and “bad” art out there in the universe, perhaps skulking outside Plato’s cave, or in a corner of the mind of God, there is no human means of getting at it; the best we’d ever be able to do is agree with the people in our immediate conversation on what that metric might be, but that agreement only really tells us we have the ability to persuade and compromise and be social, but it gets no one any closer to some arbitration outside human judgement, flawed as it is by our limited perspective and the contingency of our being stuck in linear time, among other things (our desire to be admired by our peers, for instance).
Focusing on whether or not art is “good” or “bad” is a great way to snuff out curiosity, wonder, and joy, and I would rather delight in created works than judge them so I made a decision long ago to avoid using those words when describing art in favor of describing my experience more specifically. This has led to me enjoying a lot more. I get told often that I am a “generous” reader/audience member, which seems like I’m maybe on the right track.
None of this is to say I do not, in my own work, attend to craft, or that I don’t edit, or have a sense of when, say, a poem is ready for someone else to read it, but those judgement calls are, to be honest, mostly instinctive, which is another way of saying that I’ve been reading and writing poems for so long that I have a “feel” for it, the same way I no longer have to think or even explicitly pay attention to when the stovetop espresso pot is about reach a boil — I “just know” — and with my own work it’s the same way; I am dissatisfied with it and work on it until I am not, until the little inner itch stops bothering me. A magnet in me points north again, and I know, the poem is ready.
But! This is about Christmas playlists, of which I have made several over the years. A favorite, that has stuck with me since early aughts is called “Not the Miracle Kind,” and it was in making the playlist that I it upon the realization that many “Christmas” songs (e.g. “Jingle Bells,” “Dashing Through The Snow,” “Winter Wonderland”) are actually about it being winter, and I conceived of the playlist in a different way, including some of my favorite songs about winter, and it is that approach that I have stuck with over the years, leading me to some lovely discoveries such as the whole subgenre of songs about being poor and it being Christmas, (Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December, Over the Rhine’s “We’re Gonna Pull Through,” Sharon Jone’s “Ain’t No Chimneys In The Projects,” James Brown’s “Santa Clause Go Straight To The Ghetto,” the original lyrics to “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” which is the version Ella Fitzgerald sings, and which has the original lyric “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow,” instead of the much more shopping-mall-friendly “hang a shining star upon the highest bough”).
Christmas seems to have become, in the U.S., anyway, a vehicle for nostalgia for the late 1940s through the early 1970s, in other words, the years of prosperity brought on by the New Deal. For example, my generation (Gen X) grew up watching holiday TV specials produced by and for the previous generation (“A Charlie Brown Christmas,” “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” all first aired between 1964 and 1966), and the soundtrack to the Charlie Brown special is one of the most-played Christmas albums ever. The content of a lot of modern Christmas songs is itself nostalgia for the early 20th century, making Christmas popular culture an exercise in nostalgia. It makes sense, in a way; my own complicated expectations and feelings about Christmas were formed when I was a child; for example, one of my favorite Christmas albums is The Bells Of Dublin by the Chieftains, which is an excellent record for many reasons, but I am also very attached to it, because it was an album my parents played every year after it was released. I don’t quite know what to make of this nostalgia; I am usually suspicious of nostalgia when I perceive it in myself, because it has a way of romanticizing the past. The Ford/Carter/Reagan years in the U.S., which is when I was a child, were not great years for my family or the country; in many ways, Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon was the first domino in a process that ultimately dismantled most of the New Deal, enabling the reversal of its effect on the country, such that now, the gap between rich and poor is at its greatest since the Gilded Age (if not greater).
My family weren’t dirt poor in the Reagan years, but we were powdered milk poor. My father was laid off three times between the year I was born and the year I graduated high school, and he had a “good” degree in electrical engineering that was supposed to give him financial security. He kept voting for Republicans who kept screwing him (and the rest of the middle class) over, and by the time I was old enough to vote, the Democrats had adopted a lite version of Reagan’s screw-the-middle-class policies (“what if we screwed them less?” asked Bill Clinton. “But, like, only slightly less?”). (There is actually a Christmas song for that, Steve Earle’s “Christmas In Washington,” which is also a political anthem, and a union song, and it contains the best, and most damning summary of every Democratic presidency from Clinton onward when it describes Clinton’s agenda as “things not getting worse,” which is often what I feel like I’m voting for in Presidential elections.)
The point is that there’s not much for me to be nostalgic for, when it comes to my childhood, so the carbon-copied nostalgia for the 1950s in a lot Christmas music, while aesthetically enjoyable, (the vocal harmonies in '50s pop!) is also a little weird when I think about it; I never experienced Christmas in 1955 or 1935 but a lot of the songs are doing a lot of work musically and lyrically to recall those decades. It’ll be interesting to see if the ripple effect of that carries forward another generation or two; my own kids have heard me playing, for example, Christmas music by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and the Vince Guaraldi Trio (and the Chieftains!) yearly, so perhaps their own “Christmasy” feeling will be tied to that old music as well.
In any case, that means even though my musical taste already runs from the late 1940s (the rise of swing jazz) to the present day, my Christmas playlists tend to be more inclusive of music from across those seven decades, and this rather ecumenical approach still results in fairly cohesive playlists (I think, anyway). So: is “Christmas music” a genre?
If it is, it must encompass all the other genres, because in every (other?) genre there has been at least one Christmas song/piece. Of course there is Christmas jazz, Christmas country, Christmas R&B, and so on, but there is also Christmas metal, Christmas hip hop and Christmas punk, all genres that you’d think would not lend themselves to either a Christmasy sound or message, but Alice Cooper, Ghostface Killah and The Ramones, who all have Christmas songs, would all beg to differ. Someone once pointed out to me that Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and “Deck The Halls” have the same meter in their lyrics, meaning you can sing one to the tune of the other, and aside from the fact that I am holding out hope for Ozzy to give us a “Deck The Halls” sung to the melody of “War Pigs,” (hopefully with an “oh Lord yeah!” at the end of the first verse), I’ll point out that this is all he would have to do to make “War Pigs” a Christmas song. Christmas can be poured into almost any container, musically speaking, and it will turn that container into Christmas music, making Christmas music the infinity that is larger than all the other infinities. Tom Petty knew this when he adapted Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster” by changing one line so the events occur on Christmas Day. Rage Against The Machine could write a Rage Against The Machine song and set the revolution at Christmas time and it would be a Christmas song. (If you are reading, members of Rage Against The Machine, I would very much like you to do this.)
That might seem to disqualify it as a genre (one has to be able to recognize a genre, after all, and if any music can be Christmas music, that becomes difficult) but Christmas music does have certain themes and tropes; I listed some of the themes above but there are many others - for example, the “I’m coming home for Christmas” theme, such as “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” but my favorite exemplars of this are Marvin Gaye’s “I Want To Come Home For Christmas,” and Paul Simon’s “Getting Ready For Christmas Day,” both of which feature soldiers wishing they could come home. Gaye's is Vietnam POW; Simon's is deployed to Iraq.
There are also the “let’s take this peace on Earth stuff seriously” songs, the defining song being John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” (which, I love the song's sentiment, but also bristle at its implication, that I must not want war to be over badly enough, because I want do war to be over, and it is so not over, but also, for a guy who wanted us to image there's no heaven, he certainly imagines there's a heaven here) but there are other good ones - U2’s “Peace On Earth” comes to mind, and grapples more realistically with the problem than Lennon did.
And these are perhaps part of a larger group of political Christmas songs; I mentioned Steve Earle above, and there’s also Jackson Browne’s “The Rebel Jesus,” which he wrote for inclusion on The Bells Of Dublin by the Chieftains. And “political” probably describes much of James Brown’s Christmas album, though not all of it, because James Brown also liked to get down, (and partying for Christmas is its own theme.) In any case, Christmas, if you take its founding story seriously, is always ultimately going to get political; it started political, so much so that one of the first consequences of it in the story is Joseph and Mary having to flee the death squads of Herod, making them refugees in another country (thankfully neither Biden nor Trump was President of Egypt, else toddler Jesus would have ended up in a cage seperated from them for years) which is probably why Santa Claus was invented, but that also doesn't work, because giving every child in the world free stuff so long as they've been good is definintely an act of political radicalism, not as radical as the story of Jesus, but still pretty radical.
Christmas songs can be bawdy (Sharon Jones’s “Big Bulbs”) and funny (Elvis Costello’s wicked “The St. Stephen’s Day Murders”). I also love old “forgotten” Christmas songs - ones that are far too old to participate in the nostalgia for the early 20th century. Bruce Cockburn’s Christmas album has several of those, sung in their original languages, as does Sting’s, and, yes, yes, The Bells Of Dublin by the Chieftains.
But I think this makes it a genre - a Christmas song is a song about Christmas, or winter, with almost any kind of music and arrangement, or, it’s a song about almost anything with a certain kind of instrumentation (jingling bells, especially played right on the beat, every beat, will do the trick). Or, perhaps a supergenre.
I have my favorite Christmas songs, and then my favorite Christmas albums - you have probably guessed how I feel about A Charlie Brown Chirstmas and The Bells Of Dublin; there are a few others that get heavy rotation every year. The complete list of my favorites, meaning they get played in their entirety multiple times a season:
- A Charlie Brown Christmas - Vince Guaraldi Trio
- The Bells Of Dublin - The Chieftains
- The Darkest Night Of The Year - Over the Rhine
- Snow Angels - Over the Rhine
- (I'll say about these 2 Over the Rhine albums that they are very different in mood, the first being brooding, spare and hallowed, the second being more upbeat, blues-and-jazz-inspired, but still with a dash of sorrow here and there)
- Have Yourself A Soulful Little Christmas - Kenny Burrell
- Ella Wishes You A Swingin' Christmas - Ella Fitzgerald
- December - George Winston
- I Dream Of Christmas - Norah Jones
- (I almost didn't list this one but then realized I've played it a lot since its 2021 release.)
- Christmas - Bruce Cockburn
- (Released in between his two albums produced by T Bone Burnett, this fits, sonically, with those, so I think of it as sort of shadow-produced by Burnett)
- Songs For Christmas - Sufjan Stevens
As a rule, I don’t play Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving. But then, I play Christmas music a lot, so much so that it throws off the metrics of my play counts in Apple Music such that Apple’s algorithm considers Vince Guaraldi and The Chieftains as top artists every year, and over time, the lifetime play count of certain Christmas songs is higher than other songs that feel like they dominated my listening. The algorithm already pretty much can’t recommend things other that what I’m already listening to to me, because my musical taste is so diverse and eclectic as to make me confounding to its math, which I love (do whatever you can to not compute!) and my Christmas music listening only exacerbates that (for example, Amy Grant’s Home For Christmas usually gets a listen, but it’s also usually the only Amy Grant album I’ll play in a given year, but that one album will mean that for a few weeks every January, the music robot thinks I want to hear new albums by artists I have never heard of in the Contemporary Christian Music genre, which, I do not. Also I feel like my colleague would not have called me a music snob if he knew how much I enjoyed Home For Christmas.)
At any rate this is all prompted by the fact that I have made yet another Christmas playlist, a fairly chill one this year, because that is the Christmas playlist I needed. I present it to you here, along with the previous ones. All of these will, if you play them very much, definitely confuse the robots spying on your listening habits, which alone is worth the price of admission. Enjoy!
Hark! Behold!
Our Future's Bright; Our Past Is Checkered
Angels Bending Near The Earth
Not The Miracle Kind
Here are some photos I took while walking the esplanade by the Charles River on a recent trip to Boston