A Christmas Pop Song Rant
A Christmas Pop Song Rant
You see, the thing I hate isn't Christmas music as a whole. I adore carols and Christmas hymns. It's the Christmas-themed popular music I can't stand.
Maybe I should explain the difference, although I expect a lot of folks already know: while we all use the terms indiscriminately, a "Christmas carol" is technically a song that's worded and structured as either a lullaby for the newborn Jesus, or a joyous announcement of His arrival. Most carols are very old traditional songs, or started out that way, but there are a few notable modern compositions that achieve a similar feel to the traditional carols, notably "Silent Night."
A "Christmas hymn" is generally addressed to God the Father instead of Jesus, but deals with Christmas themes. It's a hymn for the Christmas season. This does overlap quite a bit with the definition of "carol," especially if you want to bring Holy Trinity semantics into it, but I think calling "O Holy Night" a Christmas hymn is a fairly uncontroversial choice. The fact that it's a great song to sing while caroling doesn't disqualify it.
Christmas popular music, on the other hand… is popular music with a secular-Christmas theme. By "popular music," though, I mean any commercial music product that was originally produced to make money, whether it's "Jingle Bells" or a modern pop megastar's latest charity-fundraiser Christmas album. These songs almost exclusively shy away from older religious elements of Christmas in favor of celebrating secularized versions like Santa Claus and Christmas trees, or generic winter traditions like snowmen, coziness, and winter sports. And, yes, there are a few weird, cursed things like "Deck the Halls" (a traditional Welsh tune repurposed in the 19th century as a Christmas pop song), and there's probably some contemporary-praise artist who tried creating a new, contemporary-praise, Christmas song instead of making pepped-up versions of old Christmas carols and hymns… almost certainly equally cursed.
I should probably clarify that I'm not denouncing the secularization of Christmas. Midwinter celebrations are far, far older than Christianity, and the modern Christmas shopping season is not only a crucial element of late-stage Capitalist society, but also a highly visible example of consumers acting neither rationally nor in their own "enlightened" self-interest, and as such, I'm not going to knock it.
What I object to is the nature of most Christmas pop music. Almost without exception, there's a strong "I heard you like Christmas, so I made you some Christmas with a Christmas, so you can Christmas your Christmas with Christmas while you Christmas the Christmas this Christmas" vibe to this music, and worse, a sense of forced cheerfulness and jollity. It reaches deep down to my hindbrain and makes all my social anxieties say, "Oh, crap, here we go again." Much of it also is obvously just thrown together with minimal effort, expense, or artistic expression, simply as shovelware for a jingle-bell-addled consumer market.
The most heinous Christmas pop songs are formulated specifically to target children. Little children, Mandrake! And despite this, we are all subjected to these songs for up to four months prior to Christmas. Can you imagine what would happen to a sporting-goods store if they habitually played "Baby Shark" and the Barney theme on their Muzak?
While I can say that most of it "just isn't very good," that's a personal opinion and I refuse to claim it's relevant. But I theorize that one more reason I find so much Christmas pop music tedious and irritating is because the concept of a safely non-religious, uncontroversial "holiday season," based almost entirely on subjective feelings and concepts, is too vague, confused, and artificial to truly inspire either artist or audience.
By contrast, most Christmas carols and Christmas hymns were products of the old Christendom society, and the creators and intended audience were shaped their whole lives by European Christendom, whether they believed or not. The subject matter and relevance were powerful to them in a way that it's hard for us to understand today.
There are some anti-Christmas songs I enjoy, but anti-Christmas songs occupy a very precarious niche in the popular music ecology. A song can only be "anti-Christmas" until the Monolithic Secular Christmas Music Juggernaut adopts and assimilates it. We need to learn from what happened to "Fairytale of New York."
More Posts from Idrawtooslow and Others
Yesterday I deleted most of the reblogs in my queue. I need to either commit to this being a shitpost blog or GTFO. If I can't leave a compliment or comment on something, it's just not getting one. Anyone who cares can browse my likes.
This is not a god-emperor.
This is a god whose name is "Emperor."
Long-dead, he was the last ruler of a once-powerful empire whose cultural influence outlasted it.
Was he deified in his lifetime? We no longer know. But he is deified now.
While his memory lives on, his true name has been lost. At some point, the word "emperor" ceased to have meaning except when referring to him, therefore his name is now Emperor.
if i had a time machine and i wanted to absolutely destroy an ancient emperor or king, i would take them to the shark tunnel of an aquarium. giving them an ozymandias view of their legacy would do nothing, they can see that all empires rot just by looking around them. but the shark tunnel of an aquarium is something they haven’t seen before, something no one has seen before, something magnificent that they could build with technology only slightly out of their reach. they would bankrupt their nation trying to recreate that shark tunnel for themself. their dynasty would collapse within three generations, and, if heaven is on my side, they themself will be eaten by a shark to the delight of generations of historians to come
UPDATE: Yes, the kittens do live next door. We had no idea!
The problem with having "free range" cats is that they will annex properties and people you don't have control over, into their territory. I hope they eventually learn that the neighbors' dogs can't keep them safe up here. At least they'll put a dent in the vole population.
This is here because I can't post photos on the local message board. I'm trying to find the owner of these two kittens before the raccoons get them.
My local library has thrown away its reference section. "That stuff is all online, now."
They have thrown away most of their archive. What remains is buried in the basement under junk, and all record of its contents is lost. They have no interest in doing anything with it.
For job hunting tips, we direct you to the three biggest job hunting websites.
Homework help and tutoring comes from a local NGO, when they can afford it, although they do use our building.
We do finally have crafts, though! We turned the quiet room and the young adult reading area into a luxurious crafting station.
Legal aid isn't available. We can refer you to a local lawyer, or that local NGO. But you can look up documents online, and print them for free!
I tried to provide compassionate human connection when I worked there, but that's one of the reasons I was let go. Apparently that's something patrons are supposed to provide each other.
And we still have books! We have more and more books about fewer and fewer things, and soon we will have more fiction than ever, we just have to get rid of all the useless nonfiction that's not about hobbies, home renovation, cooking, or poetry. Nobody ever reads those books, they're just taking up space we could use for James Patterson novels!
Truly, there's no better time to visit your local library.
OSP Red, over on her Tumblr blog Comicaurora, posted a brilliant and refreshingly frank analysis of "Fable of the Dragon Tyrant."
I can't believe I didn't figure out it was an allegory about death, but we all miss something sometimes, I guess.
Go read the whole post.
@glitzbot
Revisiting the drow, playing some more with uncanny bird anatomy.
I imagined a dyscalculic child, who isn't getting any help or support in learning math, nobody understands that they just don't get it...
Nobody understands that the child tries to solve math problems by making up stories about the numbers and operational symbols, fascinating, beautiful mythical or fairy-tale stories, and "drawing" the ending of the stories where the solutions should go.
Every math problem is a hypothetical situation involving stock characters, and the child believes they have to parse exactly what the situation is supposed to be, given the limited "shorthand" consisting of numbers and operational symbols and the arithmetical frameworks, and work out what the result would be.
And nobody, or almost nobody, ever gets to hear the stories.
Him an angy boi, so, so angy!
"That bastard Liutprand, who I'm NOT done with" -OSP Blue, on the Overly Sarcastic Podcast.
Chibi portrait by OSP Red @comicaurora
I have thousands of shitposts, rants, and essays sitting in notebooks, left over from decades of not using social media or having many friends. Hold on tight.
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