They’re already so tiresome, the world doesn’t need an excuse to play Christmas carols more. I already cringe when I step into any store.
But OK, just one. As we all know, “Baby it’s cold outside” is one of the rapiest songs ever, so how about killing those lyrics? So Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski did. Here’s the new version.
I really can’t stay/Baby I’m fine with that
I’ve got to go away/Baby I’m cool with that
This evening has been/Been hoping you get home safe
So very nice/I’m glad you had a real good time
My mother will start to worry/Call her so she knows that you’re coming
Father will be pacing the floor/Better get your car a-humming
So really I’d better scurry/No rush.
Should I use the front or back door?/Which one are you pulling towards more?
The neighbors might think/That you’re a real nice girl
What is this drink?/Pomegranate La Croix
I wish I knew how/Maybe I can help you out
To break this spell/I don’t know what you’re talking about
I ought to say no, no, no/you reserve the right to say no
At least I’m gonna say that I tried/you reserve the right to say no
I really can’t stay/…Well you don’t have to
Baby it’s cold outside
I’ve got to get home/Do you know how to get there from here
Say, where is my coat/I’ll go and grab it my dear
You’ve really been grand/We’ll have to do this again
Yes I agree/How ’bout the Cheesecake Factory?
We’re bound to be talking tomorrow/Text me at your earliest convenience
At least I have been getting that vibe/Unless I catch pneumonia and die
I’ll be on my way/Thanks for the great night
I still don’t want to listen to it every day, but stripping out the consent overrides makes it a little better.
Next, kill Jesus from all those other old chestnuts. “Chestnuts”, damn. Now I’m thinking of that other Christmas favorite that starts off with a line about chestnuts…the problem with most of these songs isn’t actually the lyrics, it’s the frequency.
… it’s the frequency.
Once per century would be about right.
What brain trust calls this a Christmas song? Far be it from me to support anything that extols a pernicious and nonsensical worldview, but even I, speaking from a position of non-belief, can see that this song is all about a guy using every trick he can think of to get a woman to have sex with him. What does this have to do with Christianity? Or the solstice? Or much of anything else for that matter? That there are many people who view this song as sweet and romantic tells you a lot about what is wrong with our society.
Oh, holy shit! The rubes are greatly crapping,
on remains of our dear Nation’s soul.
Long will the world, in angst see us fapping,
‘Till we know that reason be our goal.
No thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices
In America’s broken glorious days.
Fall on your knees, oh, hear the idiot voices!
Oh, Trump descends, oh, right, in Trumpian blaze
Oh, Trump descends, oh Trump descends.
Led by the light of gilt, serenely beaming,
With glowing rage by his hairpiece we stand.
Led by the light of an Orange truly scheming,
Here come the white men from racist land.
The Trump of Trump lays high in his lair;
In all his tweets, forever be our turd.
He knows our weakness; to our needs, not a care
Behold your Trump! Before him, lowly herd!
Behold your Trump! Before him, lowly herd!
Truly he taught us to hate our brother;
His law is greed and his truth is lies.
Chains shall he wave, we are slaves to one another;
And in his name, oppression shall reach new highs.
Savage hymns of scorn in hateful chorus we scream
Let all within us curse his wretched name.
Trump is our hell. O curse his name forever.
His power and office, going down in shame.
His power and office, going down in shame.
re @2:
your nym should tell you :-)
aside from that snark…
I agree with you. Seems anything mentioning “snow” gets classified as a Xmas song. you know “♫ Dreaming ♫ of a ♫ White Christmas ♫” (gosh, eerily easy to read …*gulp*.. Careful which word you emphasize).
seriously. we do need to start calling all these tunes as “Winter Songs” and drop the religious holiday word from the classification. Many songs include reference to that religious holiday. To elevate those instances up to the title of the classification is ~ ~ objectionable to those not religious, who just want to enjoy the season, and friendship, and family, etc etc.
.
earworms no longer a mere euphenism [sic, blame Drumph for that neologism].
Silver Fox is correct: there is no reason to call “Baby It’s Cold Outside” a “Christmas song.”
And there is indeed a frequency problem, even with great songs such as the one you refer to as “Chestnuts” – which is actually titled “The Christmas Song.” Everything gets tedious when you hear it every time you walk into a store. However, if you hear it in some special circumstances, sung by Mel Torme himself, that is another matter. It would be impossible not to have been delighted to witness and hear this:
http://www.newsfromme.com/2015/12/18/my-xmas-story/
I am a lover of music I would probably not survive in a world without it but I really am growing to dislike the canned music in retail sales in general and this time of year just adds to it. when do they start inflicting it on the customers as soon as they can apparently and in places that I would have thought have almost zero tie in with christmas. As for the particular song mentioned I particularly like both Betty Carter and Ray Charles and together in Duet on this one they are wonderfully expressive but hearing it all over the place over and over is in bad taste and depressing.
fuck “muzak” and especially the christmas loop!
uncle frogy
That one got fixed for me Ians ago by Mad Magazine — it’s the only one I remember from a piece where they rewrote Christmas songs, probably back in the mid-sixties. Their version began cheerfully:
“Jack Frost roasting on an open fire,
Chestnuts nipping at your nose…”
and that’s the only way I hear that song now.
I’m also a lifelong collector of weird and fun “Christmas” music — probably driven by my misspent youth working under the yoke of department store Muzak. There is really a lot of fun stuff, and of course, some lovely stuff, like Tim Minchin’s “White Wine in the Sun”, which always makes me tear up.
I’m late, and have to go, but I’ll find some links to post later, either here or in Music or Interesting Stuff.
I like singing at Xmas. We like new songs that are not religious. In Oz its summer so we sing things like Under the Boardwalk. I like Tim Minchin s White Wine in the Sun and Emerson Lake and Palmers Christmas Carol. Some songs about life in air conditioned shopping malls would be good if any one wants to write some.
@ #7 psanity:
Evolution Control Committee also did a mashup of the song.
psanity@7, I was listening to it some years ago…wow, maybe nearly two decades now, and got to the line about the (yes, presumed default guy) with his ‘turkey and the mistletoe…’ — and well, my mind suddenly went all sorts of places. To this day, I can’t hear it without a couple of snickers and a remark or two about whether the stuffing tasted funny that year…
Also, there’s a Mad Magazine holiday special (read expensive) out this year with a couple sections of carol re-writes. You might want to thumb through it if you catch it in a checkout or magazine aisle.
Most people when they hear a song they don’t like would just listen to/write a new song. No need to save the precious melody of Bootylicious.
Oh you don’t know how privileged you are that you don’t work at such places with the goddamn christmas music! EVERY. FUCKING. YEAR. SAME. FUCKING. TAPE.
Although, since earlier this year the guy who switched the music in the mp3 player quit working for us, don’t know who’s gonna do it. I’ll just plead ignorance and hope for the best.
Pray for me!
I never understood why the song was considered “rapey”. I’ve always heard it as a woman who wants to have sex battling with the horrible sexual conventions of her era. You’ll notice that her objections to having sex involve her mother’s expectations, her father’s expectations and the neighbor’s expectations. I’m surprised she didn’t worry about her brother hurting his hand when he punched the guy in the nose. Back then brothers were expected to punch guys who had sex with their sisters in the nose.
Granted, she uses the excuse that it’s cold outside rather than that she just wants to have sex with this guy, but that was the convention back then. Women weren’t supposed to admit that they wanted to have sex, so a lot of songs about women wanting to have sex don’t actually have them saying that they want to have sex. In real life, it was different, but then you weren’t going to get your song published.
Was “I Can’t Help Myself” really about an abusive relationship? Was “Don’t You Feel My Leg” rapey as well? On the face of it, sounds even worse, and it wasn’t even cold outside. I’m sure someone with a bit more musical knowledge than I have could list hundreds of such rapey songs.
@ 10, Robert Westbrook
Oh, that made me so extremely happy.
Here’s one of my favorites. I’ve had the audio for maybe 20 years, and was enchanted to discover a YouTube video of it. Note particularly the last half. Now, there’s some Christmas spirit!
Hints for Winter Holiday type music that might tickle one’s fancy. Rather than link to the Big A, and risk breaking the link-o-meter, I’ll just list some stuff interested parties might wish to seek out:
Blame it on Christmas, Vol.1 (there is no Vol 2; possibly Vol 1 was felt to be sufficient. It include some Klezmerish things, a version of We Three Kings as if performed by the Doors with Bing Crosby as vocalist, and other wonders of the season.)
Alligator Stomp Vol 4: Cajun Christmas. Very fun, great music.
It’s Christmas, Man! by Brave Combo. (also the O Holy Night Cha Cha Cha on their Musical Varieties album)
Too Many Santas by The Bobs
Bullseye Blues Christmas
Mistletoe Jam by the Christmas Jug Band (which is Dan Hicks & friends)
HSQ Does Christmas (Again) by the Hamilton String Quartet (and really everything by HSQ; a baroque Born to Be Wild sounds downright Christmasy)
Throw in some Beatles, a bit of They Might Be Giants, maybe some Gogol Bordello, and other odds and ends, and you can make it through the season without brain damage (oh, yeah, and don’t forget some Pink Floyd).
Enjoy!
@13, andyo —
I feel your pain. See, that’s what I’m talking about. Back in Muzak days, the regular tapes were 5, 6, 8 hours long. But the Christmas tapes? 45 minutes. 45 minutes!! I’m surprised nobody went postal.
You, friend, have an amazing opportunity, since it will not be necessary for you to arrange an accident for the mp3 player guy. Take over. If you can just produce a playlist even 4 hours long, your co-workers will hail you as a hero. I have 16-hr playlist I bring in for the season. It has a lot of stuff that is not strictly seasonal, but kind of goes with, like various Rockappella, Beach Boys, Pete Seeger, the Dead, Bob Marley, the Persuasions, etc. etc.
Monty Python’s Galaxy Song. Use your imagination. Don’t let retail life destroy Shiny Winter Season for you or anyone else. Vive La Revolution!
If a customer comes up to the counter demanding to know what is playing, I’m doing it right.
I would point out that a lot of the songs which are labelled as “Christmas” songs are actually “northern hemisphere high-latitude winter” songs, particularly the ones which talk one heck of a lot about snow. As an Australian who had the misfortune of working retail for ten years (so, ten Christmases worth of these things), my first reaction when faced with some durn fool singing “Frosty the Snowman” in the middle of an Australian Christmas is to want to drag them out to the middle of the shopping centre car-park, and maroon them there with a shipping anchor on each ankle until they get a very firm idea about which season is actually impending here. (Hint: it isn’t winter).
Then again, I’m pretty sure the authors of at least some of our favourite actual Christmas Carols (such as “In The Deep Midwinter”) and actual Christmas songs (“Feed the World (Do They Know It’s Christmas)”) didn’t put much thought into meteorological accuracy when it came to their lyrics. In fact, when it comes to “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, the song inspires me with nothing more than a burning urge to get both Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to have a look at a globe, and realise the only damn place in Africa where snow falls at any time of the damn year is the very peak of Kilamanjaro (and even there, global warming is having an effect) because the entire continent straddles the tropics, which means it never cools down enough for snow in the first place. As for “In the Deep Midwinter”, I tend to want to point out to the (long-deceased) author that despite all their best efforts, the water in the hilly regions around Bethlehem would still have been drinkable, because the place is actually in the subtropical Mediterranean regions, and the temperature literally doesn’t get down to the point where water freezes solid even in the middle of a sustained cold snap. It’s also fairly low humidity there, too, so the only way you’re going to get a frosty wind coming through is if it’s a fairly strong northerly which has already been across most of the middle east and picked up a certain amount of heat from there in the first place. As for snow having fallen (much less snow on snow, or snow on snow on snow)… highly unlikely – Bethlehem is pretty much the same latitude as a lot of southern Australia, which means your more likely wintertime precipitation is rain.
Oh, and my favourite festive season song is “Jolly Old Christmas Time” by Weddings Parties Anything. Just the right combination of cranky and cynical to appeal to my retail PTSD (post-traumatic shopping distaste).
Kaleberg
There’s a certain amount of that, but the line “What’s in this drink?” tips it pretty firmly over into rapey for me. Also, decent people respect a potential partner’s no, even if they do think it’s due to social concerns rather than genuine desire – because a no due to social concerns is still a no, and those concerns are genuine even if they shouldn’t apply. The male character in the song isn’t accepting of her no, or understanding of her worries – he uses various techniques to try and get her to stay, including saying things like “what’s the sense in hurtin’ my pride?” and “how can you do this thing to me?” – basically, he is totally self-centred and manipulative, probably deliberately trying to get her drunk, and not remotely respectful of her consent.
Don’t just listen to what she’s saying, listen to what he’s saying.
#18:
List of ski areas and resorts in Africa
As a third-generation heathen, I grew up listening to parody carols. My parents have been playing Bob Rivers on repeat, throughout the ENTIRE month of December, since I was a small child. (They still do this. I am 30. Pass the eggnog.)
Thus, my strongest association with the “Chestnuts” song is the parody version, in which it’s an Alvin and the Chipmunks song, except Dave gets tired of the Chipmunks’ BS and decides to eat them for Christmas dinner. (You know, for years people said you over-rated hamsters were my meal ticket…) Thus, “Chipmunks roasting on an open fire”.
Oh come, all ye Olde Ones,
Ithaqua and Glaakti;
Come foul Tsathoggua and all nameless ones.
Come Great Cthulhu, rising from the Ocean.
O come, let us implore them,
We really can’t ignore them,
O come, let us restore them,
Great Olde Ones.
Their old dominion
Mankind now rules blithely,
Stars turning overhead to mark out our doom.
They will return here, greedy and malevolent.
O come, let us implore them,
We really can’t ignore them,
O come, let us restore them,
Great Olde Ones.
Last year, I was in a grocery store aisle when the Xmas music began on Nov. 1. I cried out loud, “I HATE CHRISTMAS MUSIC!!” A compassionate lady nearby looked like she was listening, so I added to her, “Who is there living today who has even SEEN a horse-drawn sleigh, let alone RIDDEN in one?” She replied “My next-door neighbor has one. She runs a horse farm.” This set me back, off my rant, we had a friendly conversation… to actually ride that sleigh, you would have to make a reservation, guessing when we might have enough snow here (Virginia, getting less snow each year.)
Producer: “So, Nat… at this point of the song, we want you to wish everybody a Merry Christmas.”
Nat King Cole: “Not the fucking 93-year-olds.”
/producer frantically scribbles line “for kids from 1 to 92.”
You need only to look as far as Weird Al Yankovic for non-standard Christmas music. “Christmas at Ground Zero”? Instand classic.
Yes! Here are a couple of rare Christmas 45s to add to future lists:
Santa Shops at Goodwill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i7-1DjXI4Q
That Holiday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU7qdKEdlc4
Hoppy Holiday!
*confession* OffTopic:
I adopted 2 (repeat 2) Solstice tradition movies. It’s a Wonderful Life and (of course *smirk*) A Christmas Story.
I double dog dare ya.
it is so “fra-jill-aye” (aka Fragile) they must be adopted by everyone and ring bells for the angle [sic] wings.
*brainfart*
[phonetics] frah- jheel- aye