Hey y'all, it's Ethan Kaye, Managing Editor, Biblical scholar, and the guy who sometimes vandalizes the Pop Heist newsletter when he's had too much sugar. I'm also the man who's got the holiday goods and wants to get them off his sweaty little mitts. My gift to you? A Spotify Christmas playlist that I put together! Just for you! My best friends!
Naturally, once the weather gets colder I start listening to Christmas music on my own because I don't ever leave the house anymore or go to places that play it. (My local Shop Rite, the one place I do visit, has a very eclectic store music DJ and instead of Christmas songs we get Joy Division and Nine Inch Nails. Seriously, they played NIN's "Sin" while I was shopping for fruit.) But I figured, what's the BEST OF THE BEST OF THE HOLIDAYS? And can I narrow it down to my Top 10 favorites for my friends who love Pop Heist? Of course I can! And I annotated it too!
Wait. Brett's telling me this was supposed to be short, just a piece for the newsletter. Ah well, I just made your Christmas gift super special this year!
Track 1: "Christmas Wrapping" by The Waitresses.
All things considered, my favorite Christmas song, for two reasons. For one, it's catchy as hell. Back in 1981, when it was released, the popular conception of "rap music" was "someone talks in some sort of rhythm over music". It was a time where you could release a rambling narrative about constantly screwing it up with the guy you wanted to bone in a voice that straddles the line between "I'm upset" and "I am not upset enough to change the tone or pitch of my voice, I'm more or less just grumbling." It's fucking great. But two, the bass player has absolutely no business going as hard as they do. That bassline is insanely complicated for a little ditty about finding love on Christmas night.
Track 2: "Sometimes You Have to Work On Christmas (Sometimes)" by Harvey Danger.
You know them from the '90s pop-rock anthem "Flagpole Sitta" but seriously, they are one of the best bands that ever existed, for the three albums they released. This ode to the hapless theater workers who still have to come in on Christmas Day marked the end of their initial 90s career before they went dormant for about a decade, before they released the masterpiece Little By Little in 2005. The chorus is highly contagious and is punctuated with sleigh bells that they brought up some random person from the audience to play when I saw them on their farewell tour. It ends with a Dandy Warhols-style psychedelic freak out that is perfect. And there's a very, very clever video as well.
Track 3: "Mr. Grinch" by Mojo Nixon.
We lost Mojo Nixon last year, a tragedy on the scale of the Titanic going down, although the Titanic never released an album of drunken Christmas music. "Mr. Grinch" was such a stand-out track from Horny Holidays! that it got its own video, starring Nixon and veteran character actor Stephen Tobolowsky. It's a fairly straight recording of the track from How the Grinch Stole Christmas, with a loosey-goosey saxophone solo thrown in the middle that gives you that "I heard this song coming from under a bridge one time" vibe. And it's punctuated by an aside from Nixon, who tells the Grinch in no uncertain terms that he's going to hell.
Track 4: "Step Into Christmas" by The Business.
"Step Into Christmas" is a fairly forgettable Elton John song. It rarely makes the radio and I don't think I ever heard it until college, maybe even after. However, UK punk band The Business roughed it up, changed all the lyrics to being about drinking and how stupid Christmas can be, and salvaged a much better track from a weak Elton John tune. It was released the same year as "Christmas Wrapping", interestingly enough.
Track 5: "Christmas" by The Who.
The Who's 1969 rock opera Tommy is a landmark album for numerous reasons, but this track from Side A gets them a spot on this playlist. Tommy tells the story of a child who is stricken deaf, dumb, and blind after witnessing his father return from WWII and kill his mother's new lover. Later in the musical he becomes a pinball player and leads a cult, it's a phenomenal album that turned into a wild Ken Russell film in 1975. "Christmas" mixes the frantic emotions and thoughts of the people around Tommy at Christmas with Tommy's own repeated internal monologue, "See me, feel me, touch me, heal me." It's the first song on the album that really plays with these two worlds, which continue throughout. And it's a banger. Live versions, like in this YouTube video, have more energy, with Keith Moon whirling away on the drums, but the studio album version is a great track overall.
Track 6: "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" by The Vandals.
Another stand-out track from a punk holiday album! This instrumental from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker illustrates that 1) The Vandals are incredibly skilled musicians, and 2) This song doesn't really need to be longer than a minute and 19 seconds. It's from their album Oi to the World!, known mostly for its title track which is the only Christmas song I can think of that involves a nunchuck battle on a roof. The Vandals play a Christmas show every year, their Christmas Formal, and this track typically kicks off the night.
Track 7: "I Believe In Father Christmas" by Greg Lake.
Coming in at number 7 is the debut single from Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's Greg Lake, an anti-commercialism anthem with insanely catchy melodies and synth solo. If it's even remotely linked to ELP, it's going to be putting the synthesizer through its paces. This one made this list because it's such a damn earworm, but not in a la-la-la bouncy Christmas way, in more of a bitter challenge to the holiday that is spectacularly orchestrated. This version on the playlist, by the way, is the 50th anniversary mix, with much different instrumentation and arrangements from the original, adding drum ruffs and a large choir. It's a little grand, especially next to the simplicity of the Vandals, but sometimes it feels good to go big.
Track 8: "Hooray For Santa Claus" by Sloppy Seconds.
A junk rock band, no stranger to controversy, released this entirely straight punk cover of the theme to the 1964 Christmas film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. The movie was awful, but riffing by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew made it watchable. "Hooray For Santa Claus" plays over the end credits to that film and is utterly forgettable, especially after watching the aforementioned Santa Claus lacklusterly conquer the aforementioned Martians. Mostly, I'm just glad someone acknowledged that this song existed, enough to do a cover of it.
Track 9: "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues.
There is discussion around whether or not this is a Christmas song, but I'm falling on the side of "it entirely is". It's the ballad of a ne'er-do-well, stuck in the drunk tank on Christmas Eve, dreaming of the girl who he's shared and demolished his life with. It's incredibly optimistic, looking to the stars from the absolute gutter, and it absolutely guts me when I hear it, especially now that both vocalists, Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl have passed away. This one is a karaoke favorite in our house, despite the language. Get the entire bar to sing the chorus with you, "The boys of the NYPD choir were singing 'Galway Bay', and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day."
Incidentally, Pop Heist's master writer Matthew Jackson paid tribute to MacGowan in a Heistmas article about how this very song was played at MacGowan's funeral. I'd never seen this version, shot in the church with MacGowan's casket up front and people dancing in the aisles, but did it ever leave me with tears running down my face.
Track 10: "Snow" by Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee, Danny Kaye, and Trudy Stevens.
I figured I'd end this list with a classic, but a modern one. I'm not rocking out to 'Adeste Fidelis', people. This track from the film White Christmas isn't the most well known, it's certainly not the best or worst ("Count Your Blessings Instead of Sleep" brings me to tears, it is so good), but it's a moment of true optimism at a moment in the film before everyone's plans have fallen apart. The main characters are off to Vermont to get in a little skiing in the snow! (Spoiler alert: there is no snow.) What's interesting here is that in the film, the track is sung by all of these performers except Peggy Lee—she's not in the movie at all, she's just singing for Rosemary Clooney who, being under contract with a different studio, wasn't allowed to sing on the cast album.
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