elrhiarhodan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
elrhiarhodan) wrote2010-12-04 04:14 pm
elrhiarhodan) wrote2010-12-04 04:14 pm
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Pardon Me ... A Small Holiday Season Rant
For the record, I hate Christmas music. Which has nothing to do with the fact that I don't celebrate the holiday. What I hate is the false cheer. The hypocritical message of peace and good will peddled by those who believe in anything but that. The sanctimonious imagery of a Norman Rockwell America that never existed. And most of all, the simply bad music and lyrics - bubble gum pop Auto-Tuned to bland sameness.
In other words, "Home for the Holidays." An Anti-Classic. First demortalized by Mr. Bland himself, Perry Como, then punishingly covered by The Carpenters - it's this latter version that will (if anything could) set my mind to murder and mayhem. Uber-perky (and apparently perked up on pills) Karen Carpenter trippingly sings (is that what that's called?) about how "the traffic is terrific!". Words cannot express how much I loathe and despise this recording - which, for some unfathomable reason - is played every hour on every radio station in America (even the All Talk - All The Time ones). This horror is inescapable - it's like a swiftly moving mass of sewage, creeping through even the most tightly sealed portals.
My nightmare is this - although I don't own (and certainly never will) any version of this travesty, I fear that it will somehow infect my iPod, and all 26,000+ songs will become "Home for the Holidays." Or that I'll put a CD in to play in my car, and you guessed it - that's the only song on the disc. I'll end up killing myself as I try to jump out of the moving vehicle. Anything but having to listen to Karen and/or Perry sing about the idiot from Tennesee trying to get to Pennsylvania.
As much as I loathe most American Christmas music, I actually love the old English Christmas carols. My favorite is O Come, O Come Emmanuel, which is seems more Jewish than Christian (ignoring, of course, the line "God's Dear Son"). The best rendition is the one by the King's College Choir, Cambridge. There is a section when the choir divides into six or seven part harmony (with the organ playing descant in the background), and my heart nearly stops from the perfect beauty. This recording was on an album I got from the Musical Heritage Society (probably vinyl) back in the early 1980s (I remember listening to it in college), which has been plundered for a sort of "Best of..." version that now includes some of the minor horrors of the season.
Anyway - whatever holiday shopping I need to do, I'll be doing on line, and when I have to venture out into the Danger Zone (i.e., a mall or chain store), I'll have my earbuds tightly screwed in and something a little more pleasant playing, say John Cage's 4'33".
Oh, and Happy Holidays
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I'm actually rather fond of "Christmas" music, but mostly stuff that's at LEAST 100 years old (the exceptions being John Lennon and Jethro Tull). When I was growing up, my family had three main Christmas albums (as in, LP-record, vinyl albums). Two were as old as I am, and featured "classic" seasonal songs like "Silent Night", "O Come All Ye Faithful", "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen", and (of course) "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel". I think there were maybe three (of two dozen) songs which wouldn't have been covered by a caroling group in Dickens' era. The third was an album by a choir which included my aunt, and sold to raise money for charity. Again, most of those songs were Victorian favorites, though the "B" side of the album included "modern" songs like "White Christmas"... Fortunately, it pre-dated "Rudolph The Red-Noed Reindeer" and "Frosty The Snowman"...
When I was in college, we added one more: the "Christmas Vespers" concert album from the year I was in one of the four college choral groups. It opened with "Veni, Emmanuel" in the original Latin (which we did with a soloist singing the first verse in a totally dark hall, and the rest of us joining in on the chorus and lighting flashlight-bulb "candles" while standing in a big circle around the perimeter of the college chapel), and I don't think there was a single piece that was less than 250 years old.
Since then, I've learned medieval carols and Renaissance madrigals (thank you, S.C.A.), and added Gregorian chants, Enya's gaelic version of "Silent Night", and a couple CDs of things like the Cambridge Choir and similar British versions of holiday music to our family's collection. I particularly like carols sung in their original languages (e.g.: "Adeste Fideles" rather than "O COme All Ye Faithful", "Esclarecida Madre", "Es Ist Ein Ros Entsprungen", "Noel Nouvelet", "Angeles Del Cielo", and "Stille Nacht"... all of which I've sung as part of choral performances).
OTOH, I loathe most of what plays in malls during the holidays, and have learned to NEVER turn on the car radio during December, when half the stations in our area switch to "holiday" programming. *gag* (Can we KILL whoever wrote "Feliz Navidad"?)