Tis the season to be inundated with mostly breathtakingly crappy Christmas songs, original or covers, all awful, all useless, all should be, as Scrooge once put it so wisely (my second Dickens quote in two posts: go figure) “boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart”.
First on the list would be Dylan for last years cursed Christmas album. And first runner up is ding dong Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmas Time” -the Antichrist to Lennon’s Jesus “Happy Xmas (War Is Over If You Want It”.
I do my level best to simply ignore Christmas songs and sometimes it works against me. U2 performed a very credible version of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”, the classic made famous by Darlene Love on the greatest Christmas album ever, the Spector one, and sung every year on Letterman. In a lower case but still damn good is Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” and lower still? Neon Trees “Wishlist” just released this Tuesday and for free on itunes.
These next two though? Ugh. Ugh. Helen has already nailed “Boots” so all I can do is second that emotion and note it sounds terrible with or without the video and take a moment to say that while it might be true that watching TV is a highlight of your Christmas, perhaps don’t write a song about it.
Just a touch better is betwetter Coldplay’s bloated baby please come homer (incidentally, is anybody ever happy at Christmas time? It’s like your year sucked, you are now completely alone while everybody else is loving their fellow man and each other -often carnally). There is maybe four bars of this song leading to the bridge that are lovely. But then he takes it down an octave and when it comes up again, Chris decides that what he is singing means anything at all and is indeed, an anthem, when it is, indeed, dribble.
Bah, humbug to both.