Really Bad Christmas Songs

‘Round about December 1, one of our local radio stations starts its month-long marathon of Christmas music. I have to listen, I cannot help myself. (The first step is admitting you have a problem, am I right?) I am like the main character in Kennedy Toole’s  A Confederacy of Dunces, who can’t stop going to see Doris Day movies so he can yell “abomination!” at the screen.

Therefore, I feel I’m in a position to pontificate about some truly eardrum-rendingly bad Christmas.

Herewith, for your delectation, are Squillo’s Bottom Three Worst Christmas Songs I’ve Heard This Year (or maybe any year):

#1~ Jingle Bells ~ Andrea Bocelli & the Muppets.

It isn’t that I dislike Andrea Bocelli’s voice (although I do), and my opinion is that the presence of Muppets can only improve most artistic endeavors (see my previous post for examples)—it’s the arrangement, stupid. If there has ever existed a worse arrangement of this holiday favorite, I’ll eat my Rudolf horns. From the sloowwww, schmaltzy intro, to the cadences of the chorus that sound like hockey-fan chanting, whoever committed this abomination to staff paper clearly took a kitchen-sink approach that renders this simple, and normally charming tune excruciatingly painful to listen to:

#2 ~ Do They Know It’s Christmas? ~ Band Aid

This next one is on my annual Xmas ($)hit-list for its inglorious combination of appallingly bad music, really stupid lyrics, and self-righteous do-goodism that plagues complaint-rock in general, and is particularly annoying at Christmas, when I’m trying to get my merry, merry consumer jones on. I don’t know about you, but something about a bunch of multi-millionaires waxing all sad and unhappy-like about the plight of the starving peoples of the world just rubs me  the wrong way.

Now, I understand that the original concept was to give proceeds to said starving classes, and I applaud the idea, but really, couldn’t they have made a better song?

And I’m not sure the lyrics “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime” and “Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?” are a great choice, knowwhattimean? ‘Cause lots of folks in the places they’re trying to help don’t fucking CARE about Christmas. They don’t celebrate it, and it wouldn’t matter if they did, because they’re fucking STARVING! Whether or not they know it’s Christmastime—silly, backwards folks they are—is totally beside the point. (Not to mention that, um, most of Africa’s climate is tropical or subtropical, and about 1/3 of it lies in the Southern Hemisphere, so a white Christmas could cause some, you know, problems. Just sayin.’)

#3 ~ Christmas in San Francisco ~ Vic Damone

It wouldn’t be Christmas without some geo-nostalgia, would it? From White Christmas to I’ll Be Home For Christmas, the longing for a utopian holiday home that probably never existed touches something in many of us this time of year. And obviously, the folks that market holiday music know this. But the following selection sounds like it was written on one of those songwriting machines from Orwell’s 1984, the ones that took elements from every song that ever proved popular and spit out tunes that combined them all in tunes designed to keep the plebian masses docile and mostly brain-dead (presumably as a form of self-defense.)

Stupidest lyric: “What can you say about the Golden Gate/That hasn’t been said before?” So why the hell did you mention it? (Twice.)