Christopher Butcher raises a very good point at comics.212.net about genre-centrism, so I’m going to take a break from comics today, and offer my thoughts on another form of entertainment.
Music. Specifically, Christmas music.
I kind of hate it. I hate that it’s everywhere you try and buy so much as a pack of cigarettes. I hate that it comes in so few flavors. I hate that commercials for slapdash Christmas CDs by truly terrible pop stars clutter the television airwaves.
I could go on, but I don’t have to, because Sars at Tomato Nation sums it all up nicely. Her description of the noise pollution of the average mall is particularly vivid:
“…a unique Christmas-music hell in that every store has a different song loop, each one blaring out the open front doors and competing not only with each other but with the mall’s own PA system, and the mall’s mix is extra-heavy on the sleigh bells and psychotically cheery trumpets in order to make itself heard over ringing cash registers, children screaming their heads off in terror because Santa smells like a rum-soaked diaper…”
Okay, so I don’t hate all of it, but what I do like is kind of weird. I guess it’s not so odd that I could confine my holiday-themed musical selections to the soundtrack from A Charlie Brown Christmas, which strikes every nostalgia nerve I have, beyond being just plain great music.
It gets weird when I look at the great mountain of depressing Christmas music that seems to have collected in our house. It’s all very restful on the surface, but ultimately somber and kind of unnerving. Imagine the most depressing holiday movie you’ve ever seen, and put in a wordless montage where the family is gathered in the waiting room at the hospital to see if grandpa is going to survive the drunk driving accident he got into on the way home from mass (because losing grandma would be hard enough), and then imagine the music that would score that scene as, say, Blythe Danner tries to comfort her family. Yeah, that’s the kind of Christmas music we like in our house.
(Sidenote: The most depressing holiday movie I’ve ever seen is The Last Best Year, starring Mary Tyler Moore as a psychologist and Bernadette Peters as her terminally ill patient. They move Christmas forward to allow Bernadette to enjoy the holiday one last time with her small but loyal circle of friends and… damn, it’s sad. Great, but sad. They’ve never aired it again, to my knowledge, not even on Lifetime.)
Also beloved in our household is Do You Hear What We Hear?, the Christmas album by Kiki and Herb, the profoundly disturbed lounge-act alter-egos of Justin (Kiki) Bond and Kenny (Herb) Mellman. Part cabaret act, part Edward Albee, part primal scream therapy, part deranged musicologists, these two will twist the most horrifying sentiments out of seemingly innocent holiday standards. My favorite track from the CD is probably Whose Child is This?, a medley of What Child is This?, Deep Inside by Mary J. Blige, and Crucify by Tori Amos. They really have to be heard to be believed. Even better, go see them. But sit in the back, if you can.