I hate holiday music.
Maybe “hate” is too strong a word, but I harbor a very strong dislike for Christmas music. I don’t hate the holiday itself; it is a time of year that I get to see friends and family that don’t have the opportunity to cross my path very often, and the joy that crosses my nephew’s face when he opens an empty box from his old Uncle Jared is worth the price of admission itself (I like to buy him 1 gift, but I give him at least 5 or 6 boxes to open, so there is always a bit of a game involved. Try it if you haven’t already, especially if you have a young one that pouts a lot.). The music that follows along with the season is dreadful, as I was saying, and shows no sign of improving. That makes the days pass with a looming sense of dread at times, the fear of hearing a “Menudo Christmas” as I tour through Wal-Mart, or Bon Jovi’s holiday cheer as I pump gas or remain on hold with a telemarketer.
Why is it that Christmas music has been relegated to such horrible status? Has it always been this way? No, not as I remember. When the sounds of the season had a certain “cool hipness” to them, they were great. Bing Crosby. Nat King Cole. Sammy Davis, Jr. Deano. These guys made Christmas music cool and bearable, and recorded standards that remain as refreshing today as the time they were recorded. All that has come after has had a requisite amount of “suck” attached. Modern rockers try and try to copy the style and stylings of these legends, and always come up short. Why? Is the music itself that hard to recapture? I think not. is the Christmas feeling gone, and therefore completely lost to our generation’s musical “geniuses”? I hope not.
I helped write a Christmas song that appeared on a local radio station’s charity cd sampler years ago, and the song itself was an earnest attempt to capture that “groovy, swinging holiday sound” that the masters left behind. I thought we came close. It had some great swing guitar, a nice brushy beat, a walking bass line, and I threw in a little scat singing for good measure. Listening to it, I was fairly proud, but it still came far short of measuring up to Bing. That was my last attempt. Since then, my disdain for the art form itself has grown and worsened.
So, if anybody out there is going to play a little Christmas music, try to make it good. All the new stuff is completely infused with “suck”.
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We want to thank our fellow Buzzards for the round of suggestions on The Buzz this week and we’re proud to present Episode #012 - The Good Vibrations Show with The Swinging Pachyderms.
