While I generally like most Christmas music, there are a few songs that, in my humble opinion, need to go away. Now.
“Last Christmas” by Wham. Can someone please tell me how a song about someone’s relationship drama and his apparent inability to get over it became a beloved holiday song? Why do the light rock stations – you know, the radio stations that start their 24/7 non-stop Christmas music the week before Thanksgiving – have this song in heavy rotation? Because to me, it’s not a “happy holidays” type of song. It’s more of a “you hurt me bad so I’m gonna move on but I really can’t stop thinking about how much you hurt me” kind of song. Not the song I want to be listening to when I’m trying to have a merry Christmas.
“Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney. Normally there’s very little in the musical world involving Paul McCartney that I don’t like. He’s been knighted for a reason! And the message of this song is really what Christmas is about. So why don’t I like it?
One word: synthesizers. Not only are they used with reckless abandon in this song, but the way they are used brings me back to middle school chorus and my teacher’s synthesizer. She would spend tens of minutes going over all the various settings and playing with all the buttons to get exactly the combination she wanted of pre-recorded beats and artificial instruments to accompany our vocal styling. It’s got that “I just got this synthesizer for Christmas and I want to experiment” vibe – sort of like this. The whole song gives me middle school flashbacks. So despite the happy lyrics, I just can’t get into this song because for me, music is all about the mood of the song, and middle school flashbacks do not make for a happy holidays mood.
Like I said, I do like Christmas music in general. I have over 300 holiday songs on my iPod right now so I can listen at work. But these two songs do absolutely nothing for my holiday spirit and I’d be happy if I never heard them again.






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