Jeff Matthews
Dec 3, 201523 min
2015
Editor’s Note:
We have not heard much new in the way of
holiday music, so let’s turn straight to the rock and roll biography
scene—specifically Chrissie Hyndes’ autobiography, “Reckless: My Life as a
Pretender,” which is like witnessing a car wreck in book form.
While there’s plenty here that’s harmless and
bland (early days in Ohio, e.g.), there’s plenty that makes you want to put the
book away in a very dark place, and all you can think is, How was she not
part of “that stupid club,” as Kurt Cobain’s mother called it? (Look it up,
kids.)
Similarly depressing are some rock movies
we’ve been watching on Netflix—starting with the Levon Helms biography, “Ain’t
In It for My Health,” which minces no words when it comes to his former bandmate and nemesis, the Canadian
songwriter Robbie Robertson, who squeezed out of Levon (the only American in The Band) vibrant scenes of Americana (“The Weight,” and especially,
“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) without sharing the royalties.
Even more depressing than the Hynes book and
the Helms movie combined, however, is the Glenn Campbell-gets-diagnosed-with-Alzheimers-while-you-watch
film, “I’ll Be Me.” Your editor saw
Campbell perform at a Wall Street birthday bash circa 1997, and he was clearly
miserable throughout: flushed faced and word-slurring, Campbell and his band blew
through his greatest hits like Bob Dylan on a bad day, and, embarrassingly to
everybody in the room, kept calling the host—whose name was Paul and who, when
introducing the singer, nearly broke down while talking about how much it meant
having him perform—“Pete.”
But “I’ll Be Me” does a great job explaining
Campbell’s life now and back when…and if you’re interested in knowing more about that back when, you ought to watch “The Wrecking Crew,” our last movie
shout-out.
“The Wrecking Crew” was the name of the L.A.
session players behind The Byrds, The Beach Boys and classics like “I Got You,
Babe”—just listen to Hal Blaine’s slamming drums on the outro—and the movie is
a joyous look at the faces behind the instruments behind the songs. Glen Campbell was a supremely talented
guitarist for the Wrecking Crew before he decided—to the initial amusement and
later jealousy of some of the Crew—go for the gold himself.
Suggestions on other movies (and books) are
encouraged in the comments below…after all, your editor hasn’t finished
compiling his Christmas list, if you get our drift…
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah
and a Good New Year to All!
—JM, December 3, 2015
2014
Editor’s Note:
Well,
Michael Bublé’s computer is still releasing holiday songs, which is the worst
we can say about this year’s holiday music survey. The best we can
say—and it is truly good news—is that The Boss’s hard-driving, live version of
“Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” done entirely without computer-aided
Bublé-style vocals, seems to be gaining much deserved traction.
Meanwhile,
one of our previous also-ran mentions in the What-Did-We-Do-To-Deserve-This?
category, one Taylor Swift, deserves a big boo-yah for telling the Spotify
algorithms to stuff it, pulling her entire catalogue from the
automated listening service—including, by definition, the song mentioned here
last year, which should be no tragedy to Spotify customers anyhow.
As
for our usual review of the latest rock memoirs, which tend to flood the
bookshelves right about now—only to turn up in the mark-down bins come spring,
which is when your editor actually buys them—the best read during brief trips
to our local, increasingly down-on-its-heals Barnes & Noble, has to be
Mick Fleetwood’s “Play On.”
Fleetwood
is one of the most underrated drummers in rock music, being the kind who drives
the beat without histrionics and stays well behind the kit while the
front-people do their thing (it was Fleetwood and fellow Mac bassist John McVie
who rescued “Werewolves of London” for Warren Zevon and producer
Jackson Browne, after the house band could not make the song work) so his
remembrances of the formation of Fleetwood Mac are insightful and compelling
even for those—including your editor—who were never big Fleetwood Mac fans.
Currently
priced at $30.79 at Barnes & Noble for the hard copy version, or $21.00
on Amazon, I’ll wait until spring and pick it up for $5.99—sorry Mick, but
that’s the business we’re in.
Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all!
—JM,
December 19, 2014
2013
Editor’s Note: The most unnerving aspect to this
year’s holiday music survey is the unavoidable, near-totalitarian presence
of an insipid cover version of George Michael’s already-plenty-insipid-for-our-taste-thank-you-very-much
“Last Christmas,” which, as we point out below has one of the most inane
choruses ever written (no mean feat there), which wouldn’t be so bad except it
is repeated over and over and over until you want to hand yourself over to
Vladimir Putin’s security forces and let them do their worst.
The
perpetrator of this latest holiday music outrage is, it turns out, Taylor
Swift, about whom your editor knows nothing except she adds exceedingly little
to a song that needed plenty of help to begin with.
But,
as always with these annual surveys, your editor digresses.
On
the happier side of the music world, this last year has seen a number of
excellent new rock memoirs, of which Kinks front-man and songwriting genius Ray
Davies’ is the most interesting.
The
centerpiece of the story line in Ray’s “Americana” is his getting shot
by a mugger in New Orleans some years back, but interspersing that tale he
manages to tell much of the story of his career.
If
you want to read how Ray came up with classics like “Better Things” (why
couldn’t that be a Christmas song? It’s as much about the
holidays as “Same Old Lang Syne,” about which your editor has plenty to say
later on), this is your book.
Neil
Young’s “Waging Heavy Peace,” which came out last year, is even better
than “Americana,” however, and more fun to keep picking up when the mood
strikes: Neil’s recollections are loopy, digressive, and admittedly unsure in
some cases (at one point he compares his memory of a drug bust with
Stephen Stills’ recollection of the same drug bust—and given that Neil only
stopped “smoking weed” the year before writing the book, as he admits, it’s no
wonder their recollections are very different), but like all things Neil Young,
he says what he means and means what he says.
And
if you’re wondering where songs come from—great songs, eternal songs—Neil’s
book is the place to begin.
Would
that a holiday song may one day spring from the fecund mind of Neil Young
himself, for while he professes more of a Native American religious spirit than
a Judeo-Christian one, either way, it would be so long Taylor Swift.
Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all!
—JM,
December 7, 2013
2012
Editor’s Note: We interrupt this holiday music review to
bring you a potential stocking-stuffer that ought to bring tidings of good
cheer…
Amazon.com: Secrets in Plain Sight: Business &
Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett (eBooks on Investing Series Book 1) eBook:
Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett (eBooks on Investing Series Book 1) eBook:
Jeff Matthews: Kindle Store
Jeff Matthews: Kindle Store
2011
Editor’s Note: Back by popular demand, we’ll again try to keep
this year’s update brief…but past performance would tell you not to hold your
breath. Here goes.
Our
annual holiday music survey—highly biased, rankly unscientific and in no way
comprehensive—covers new ground this year, to wit: the SiriusXM
all-holiday-music channel.
Actually,
there are two such channels courtesy of the satellite radio
monopolists at SiriusXM. There’s one for “traditional” music of the Bing
Crosby kind, in which human beings sing traditional Christmas songs while other
human beings play musical instruments to accompany those songs; and there’s
another channel for everything else, including the Auto-Tune-dependent
sensation Michael Bublé, who has only gotten more popular—unfortunately—this
year, along with a new presence not entirely unexpected but nonetheless
frightening in its implications: Justin Bieber.
Enough
said about that, for our main beef with SiriusXM is not the
presence of yet another teen idol on the holiday music scene.
Our
beef lies with the soul-less quality of the entire SiriusXM gestalt, which
requires its three thousand channels to carry songs strictly
on the basis of whether they share either a common date of issue (as on
the “40’s at 4,” “50’s at 5,” “60’s at 6” et al channels),
or a common target audience demographic.
Among
the later, for example is the “Classic Vinyl” channel, which is
essentially a “Classic Rock” channel (“Classic Rock” being a Baby Boomer
euphemism for what our parents knew as “Oldies” radio) that plays the
WNEW-FM playlist from around 1968 to 1978. And nothing else.
And
there is the “Classic Rewind” channel, which is another Oldies
channel that plays the WPLR-FM playlist from about 1979 to the late 1980s. And
nothing else.
Then
there’s “The Bridge,” a Baby Boomer euphemism for “Easy Listening.” It
plays Oldies of the James Taylor/Carole King/Jackson Browne vein.
And
nothing else.
Certainly
there are one or two such channels that manage to jump around between
genres (The Spectrum is worthwhile on that score). But, in the main, each
SiriusXM channel is tightly focused on a specific, narrowly defined
demographic…sometimes scarily so.
Here we’re thinking of the “Metal” channel, which plays loosely
defined “songs” that consist of young men screaming their apocalyptic
guts out above what appears to be a single, head-banging, machine-gun-style
guitar-and-drumming musical track that never, ever changes.
You marvel at where these guys came from, what portion of the domestic
methamphetamine supply they consume, and how many serial killers might be
listening to “Metal” channel at the very same moment as you.
If
Beavis and Butt-Head could afford a car, this would be their channel.
Unfortunately,
no matter which channel you pick and who the purported “DJ” may be
(there are a lot of old-time, smokey-voiced, recognizable DJs on the various
Sirius Oldies channels) you’ll hear a sequence of songs that all sound
like a computerized random-number-generator picked ‘em.
Listening
to the “60’s at 6” channel, for example, you may hear a great Beatles single
like “Hello, Goodbye” from 1967, followed by the wretchedly excessive
“MacAurther Park” from 1968, followed by an unrecognizable chart-topper from
1962 that nobody plays anymore because it wasn’t any good even in 1962.
The
listener ends up flipping around from channel to channel and wondering why the
bandwidth-happy SiriusXM monopolists don’t just give each artist its own
channel, as they in fact do for Springsteen, Elvis and Sinatra.
Those are channels you might expect to find, but there is, oddly enough,
no Bob Marley or Rolling Stones channel—and, head-scratcher of all
head-scratchers, no Beatles channel.
In
fact, the absence of The Beatles from the SiriusXM digital bandwidth relative
to, say, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, is one the great mysteries of our age.
After
all, the Beatles individually and collectively contributed 27of the Rolling
Stone Top 500 Songs of All-Time or 5.4% of those songs, yet they get nowhere
near 5.4% of the SiriusXM airplay, whether on “Classic
Vinyl,” “Classic Rewind,” “The Bridge,” “60’s on
6, ” “70’s on 7,” “The Spectrum” or any of the other
three thousand channels here.
You
quite literally have as much chance of hearing “Snoopy and the Red Barron” on
SiriusXM as “Revolution.”
So
why then is there a Jimmy Buffett channel (called
“Margaritaville,” of course)?
Having
gotten all that off our chest, we can move on, since SiriusXM’s holiday
channels add no new material to our annual survey because most of the songs are
widely played everywhere else.
Furthermore,
we’ve been asked to assemble a “Top Ten Worst” list of holiday songs
for this review. The problem is there are just so many, as we’ll be
getting to shortly. Rod Stewart’s somnambulant “My Favorite Things,”
which sounds like he’s reading the lyrics from a child’s book of verses, is
right up there, while Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” stands out in
any crowd of non-favorites.
Easier,
then, to simply identify the All-Time, Number One, No-Question-About-It
NotMakingThisUp Worst Holiday Song of All Time, and let everyone else argue
about the remaining 9.
It
is “The 12 Pains of Christmas.”
This
so-called comedy song takeoff on “The 12 Days of Christmas,” a pleasant
English Christmas carol discovered by a U.S. schoolteacher from Milwaukee and
used by her in a Christmas pageant in 1910, is an easily forgettable
humorous novelty song that is neither novel or humorous, in any way.
It
isn’t even fun writing about, so we won’t bother: we’ll simply
move on to something pleasant, which happens to be an entirely
different sort of humorous novelty song that is both novel and humorous,
and, therefore, well worth a mention here.
We’re
talking about the wonderfully bizarre, catchy, Klezmer-style cover
of “Must Be Santa,” from Bob Dylan’s 2009 Christmas
album, “Christmas in the Heart.” (Yes, Bob Dylan made a Christmas
album.)
The
music is fast and cheerful, and Dylan’s low, growly voice is almost
indistinguishable from Tom Waits. (The truly bizarre music video is not
to be missed, watch it here.) After you get over the initial
shock of hearing Bob Dylan singing what most Baby Boomer parents will recall
being a Raffi song, it becomes impossible to not enjoy.
Another
glaring absence from our previous years’ commentary is neither novel or
humorous, and inconceivably does not appear to qualify for the SiriusXM
random-song-generator holiday song playlist despite being many-times more
worthwhile than most of the SiriusXM catalogue, whether holiday-themed or not.
The
song is “2000 Miles” by the Pretenders, and it belongs on anybody’s Holiday Top
Ten.
If
hearing Chrissie Hynde on that original song (she’s also recorded some good
Christmas covers, including one with the Blind Boys of Alabama) doesn’t get you
in a mellow holiday mood, nothing will.
Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all.
—JM,
December 4, 2011
2010
Editor’s Note: Back for the third consecutive year by
popular demand, we’ll try to keep this year’s update brief—but don’t count on
it.
For
starters, we’re going to plug a book: Keith Richards’ autobiography, “Life,”
which happens to be one of the best books ever written—and we don’t just mean
“Best in the Category of ‘Memoirs by Nearly-Dead Rock Stars’.”
It
is a great book, period.
The
story of how ‘Keef’ (as he signs sweet letters to his Mum while rampaging
across America), Brian and Mick developed the Rolling Stones’ sound, for
example, is worth the price alone (in short, they worked really hard;
but the full story is much better than that).
Yet
there’s more—much more. Guitarists can soak up how Keith created his own guitar
sound; drummers will learn—if they didn’t already know—Charlie Watts’ high-hat
trick (and from whom he stole it); while songwriters had better prepare
themselves to be depressed at how Mick wrote songs (‘As fast as his hand
could write the words, he wrote the lyrics,’ according to one session man
who watched him write “Brown Sugar”).
And
that’s just the rock-and-roll stuff.
The
sex-and-drugs stuff is also there, and the author lays it all out in his
unfettered, matter-of-fact, straightforward style, often with the first-person
help of friends and others-who-where-there (and presumably of sounder mind and
body than you-know-who: the drug and alcohol intake is truly staggering) who
write of their own experiences with the band.
Okay,
you may say, but how exactly is Keith Richards’ autobiography relevant
to our annual review of holiday songs?
Well,
while furtively reading snatches of ‘Life’ during a stop at the
local Borders (we expect to see the book under the Christmas tree sometime
around the 25th of this month, hint-hint), we happened to hear another musical
legend perform one of our favorite offbeat Christmas songs in the background,
and it occurred to your Editor that of all the bands out there that could have
done that same kind of interesting, worthwhile Christmas song, The Rolling
Stones probably top the list.
What
with Keef’s bluesy undertones and Mick’s commercial-but-sinister instincts on
top, it would have certainly made this review, for better or worse. (Along
these lines, The Kinks’ cynical, working-class “Father Christmas” is one
of the all-time greats, and doesn’t get nearly enough air-time these days.)
Now,
for the record, the offbeat Christmas song that triggered this excursion was “’Zat
You Santa Claus?”—the Louis Armstrong and The Commanders version from the
1950’s. (The song was later covered, like everything else but the Raffi
catalogue, by Harry Connick, Jr.)
Starting
out with jingle bells, blowing winds and a slide-whistle, you might initially
dismiss “’Zat You?” as a sadly commercial attempt by Armstrong to get in
on the Christmas song thing, except that his familiar, Mack-the-Knife-style
vocal comes over a terrific backbeat that turns it into what we’d nominate for
Funkiest Christmas Song Ever Recorded.
It is a
delight to hear, and the fact that it is suddenly getting more air-time this
season is a step-up in quality for the entire category—or would be, if not for
the apparent installation of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” in the pantheon of
Christmas Classics.
A
1980’s electro-synth Brit-Pop timepiece, “Last Christmas” combines a
somewhat catchy tune with lyrics that make a trapped listener attempt to open
the car door even at high speeds to get away:
Last
Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the
very next day you gave it away
This
year
To save
me from tears,
I gave it
to someone special
Considering
the fact that the songwriter (Wham!’s gay front-man, George Michael) decided to
repeat that chorus six times, the full banality of the lyric eventually gives
way to incredulity: “Let me get this straight,” you begin to ask
yourself. “This year he’s giving his heart to ‘someone special’… so who’d
he give it to last year? The mailman?”
“Last
Christmas” does have the distinction of being the biggest selling single in
UK history that never made it to Number 1. Furthermore, all royalties from the
single were donated to Ethiopian famine relief, the same cause which led to
creation of what turned out to be the actual Number 1 UK single that year, “Do
They Know It’s Christmas?”
“Do
They Know…” is a song that has received some push from readers to receive
an honorable mention in these pages, and while it is certainly an interesting
timepiece, with much earnest participation from the likes of Sting, Bono and
even Sir Paul, it is not nearly as worthwhile as an album that seems just as
prevalent these days: A Charlie Brown Christmas by jazz
pianist Vince Guaraldi.
How
a jazz pianist was hired to create the music for a TV special with cartoon
characters is this: the producer heard Guaraldi’s classic instrumental “Cast
Your Fate to the Wind” on the radio while taking a cab across the Golden
Gate Bridge.
One
thing led to another, and thanks to that odd bit of chance, future generations
will have the immense pleasure of hearing a timeless, unique work of art every
year around this time. (A second odd tidbit for our West Coast readers:
Guaraldi died while staying at the Red Cottage Inn, in Menlo Park—of a heart
attack, however, and not the usual, more gruesome fate of musicians who die in
hotels.)
One
second-to-last note before we move on: we have been heavily lobbied by certain,
er, close relations to include Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is
You” as a worthwhile holiday song—despite our previously expressed
misgivings about her contribution to the genre (see below).
And
we have to admit, her “All I Want…” leaves behind the incessant vocal
pyrotechnics that made some of her other Christmas covers (“Oh Holy Night,”
for example) unbearable, at least to our ears.
In
this case she seems to trust the song to take care of itself, which it does in
fine, driving, upbeat style. Now, as Your Editor previously hinted, all he wants
for Christmas is Keef’s book. And it had better be there, if, as previously
noted, you get our drift.
Finally,
and speaking of autobiographies, we happened to read Andy Williams’ own book
this past year and must report that our reference to Williams below was overly
harsh. For one thing, his book is as honest as Keef’s; for another, as a singer
not necessarily born with the vocal equipment of, say, Mariah Carey, the man
worked at his craft and succeeded mightily where many others failed.
Which,
we might add, is, after all, the hope of this season.
And so,
we wish for a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all.
—JM,
December 13, 2010
2009
Editor’s Note:
Back by popular demand, what follows is our
year-end sampling of the Christmas songs playing incessantly on a radio station
near you, and it demands from your editor only a few updates this holiday
season.
For
starters, we have not heard the dreaded duet of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey
singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” thus far in 2009, and for this we are most
grateful.
Indeed,
if it turns out that their recording has been confiscated by Government
Authorities for use as an alternative to lethal injections, we’ll consider
ourselves a positive force for society.
On
the other hand, we are sorry to report an offset to that cheery development, in
the form of a surge in playing time for Barry Manilow’s chirpy imitation of the
classic Bing Crosby/Andrew Sisters version of “Jingle Bells.”
For
the record, “Jingle Bells” was written in 1857…for Thanksgiving, not for
Christmas. And it’s hard to imagine making a better version than that recorded
by Bing and the three Andrew Sisters 86 years later.
But
Manilow, it seems, didn’t bother to try.
Instead, Barry and his back-up
group, called Expos, simply copied Bing’s recording, right down to that stutter
in the Andrews Sisters’ unique, roller-coaster vocals on the choruses, as well
as Bing’s breezy, improvised, “oh we’re gonna have a lotta fun” throwaway line
on the last chorus.
Sharp-eared
readers might say, “Well, so what else would you expect from a guy who sang ‘I
Write the Songs’…which was in fact written by somebody else?”
We
can’t argue with that, but we will point out another annoyance this year: the
enlarged presence of Rod Stewart in the Christmas play-lists.
Don’t
get us wrong: we like Rod Stewart—at least, the Rod Stewart who gave the world
what Your Editor still considers the best coming-of-age song ever written and
recorded: “Every Picture Tells a Story.”
It’s
the Rod Stewart who gave us “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” we’re less crazy
about. So too the Rod who chose to cover “My Favorite Things” (for the
definitive version of that classic, see: ‘Bennett, Tony’) and “Baby It’s Cold
Outside” with Dolly Parton (for an only slightly more offensive version of this
one, see: ‘Simpson, Jessica’ and ‘Lachey, Nick’).
As
an antidote to Rod, we suggest several doses of Jack Johnson’s sly, understated
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which seems to be gaining recognition, and
anything by James Taylor—especially his darkly melancholic “Have Yourself a
Merry Little Christmas.”
Of
all the singers who recorded versions of this last—and Sinatra’s might be the
best—it is Taylor, a former junkie, who probably expresses more of the intended
spirit of this disarmingly titled song.
After
all, the original lyric ended not with the upbeat “Have yourself a merry little
Christmas, let your heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of
sight,” but with this:
“Have
yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last/Next year we may all be
living in the past.”
No,
we are not making that up. The good news is it should keep Barry Manilow
from be covering it any time soon.
JM—December
19, 2009
Wednesday,
December 24, 2008
Shazam!
From the Boss to the King to John & Paul (But Not George or Ringo), Not
to Mention Jessica & Nick
Like
everyone else out there, we’ve been hearing Christmas songs since the day our
local radio station switched to holiday music sometime around, oh, July 4th, it
feels like.
And
while it may just be a symptom of our own aging, the 24/7 holiday music
programming appears to have stretched the song quality pool from what once
seemed Olympic-deep to, nowadays, more of a wading pool-depth.
What
we recall in our youth to be a handful of mostly good, listenable songs—Nat
King Cole’s incomparable cover of “The Christmas Song” (written by an
insufferable bore: more on that later); Bing’s mellow, smoky, “White
Christmas”; and even Brenda Lee’s country-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas
Tree” (recorded when she was 13: try to get your mind around that)—played over
and over a few days a year…has evolved into a thousand mediocre-at-best covers
played non-stop for months on end.
Does
anybody else out there wonder why Elvis bothered mumbling his way through “Here
Comes Santa Claus”?
It actually sounds like Elvis doing a parody of
Elvis—as if he can’t wait to get the thing over with. Fortunately The King does
get it over with, in just 1 minute, 54 seconds.
Along
with that and all the other covers, there are, occasionally, the odd original
Christmas songs—the oddest of all surely being Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang
Syne.”
You’ve
heard it: the singer meets his old lover in a grocery store, she drops her
purse, they laugh, they cry, they get drunk and realize their lives have been a
waste…and, oh, the snow turns to rain.
So
how, exactly, did that become a Christmas song?
Then
there’s ex-Beatle Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” which combines an
annoyingly catchy beat with dreadful lyrics, something McCartney often did when
John Lennon wasn’t around.
(After all, it was Lennon who replaced McCartney’s
banal, teeny-boppish opening line for “I Saw Her Standing There”—“She was just
seventeen/Never been a beauty queen” is what McCartney originally wrote—with
the more suggestive “She was just seventeen/You know what I mean,” thereby
turning a mediocre time-piece into a classic.)
But
Lennon was not around to save “Wonderful Christmastime” even though McCartney
actually recorded this relatively new Christmas standard nearly thirty years
ago, before Lennon was shot.
It
rightfully lay dormant until the advent of All-Christmas-All-The-Time
programming a couple of years ago. Fortunately, by way of offset, Lennon’s own
downbeat but enormously catchy “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” is played about as
frequently as “Wonderful Christmastime.”
Who
but John Lennon would start a Christmas song: “And so this is Christmas/And
what have you done…”? Of course, who but Paul McCartney would start a
Christmas song, “The moon is right/The spirit’s up?”
If
anything explains the Beatles’ breakup better than these two songs, we haven’t
heard it.
Now,
we don’t normally pay much attention to Christmas songs. If it isn’t one of the
aforementioned, or an old standard sung by Nat, Bing, Frank, Tony, Ella and a
few others, we’d be clueless.
But
thanks to a remarkable new technology, we here at NotMakingThisUp suddenly
found ourselves able to distinguish, for example, which blandly
indistinguishable female voice sings which blandly indistinguishable version of
“O Holy Night”—Kelly Clarkson, Celine Dion, or Mariah Carey—without any effort
at all.
The
technology is Shazam—an iPhone application that might possibly have received
the greatest amount of buzz for the least amount of apparent usefulness since
cameras on cell phones first came out.
For
readers who haven’t seen the ads or heard about Shazam’s wonders from a
breathless sub-25 year old, Shazam software lets you point your iPhone towards
any source of recorded music, like a car radio, the speaker in a Starbucks, or
even the jukebox in a bar—and learn what song is playing.
Shazam
does this by recording a selection of the music and analyzing the data. It then
displays the name of the song, the artist, the album, as well as lyrics, a band
biography and other doodads right there on the iPhone.
Now,
you may well ask, what possible use could there be for identifying a song
playing in a bar?
And
unless you’re a music critic or a song-obsessed sub-25 year old, we’re still
not sure.
But
we can say that Shazam is pretty cool. In the course of testing it on a batch
of Christmas songs—playing on a standard, nothing-special, low-fi kitchen
radio—heard from across the room, without making the least effort to get the
iPhone close to the source of the music, Shazam figured out every song but one
(a nondescript version of a nondescript song that it never could get) without a
hitch.
And,
as a result, we can now report the following:
1)
It is astounding how many Christmas songs are out there nowadays, most of them
not worth identifying, Shazam or no Shazam;
2)
All Christmas covers recorded in the last 10 years sound pretty much alike, as
if they all use the same backing track, and thus require something like Shazam
to distinguish one from the other;
3)
Nobody has yet done a cover version of Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang Syne,”
which may be the truest sign of Hope in the holiday season;
4)
None of this matters because Mariah Carey screwed up the entire holiday song
thing, anyway.
Now,
why, you may ask, would we pick on Mariah Carey, as opposed to, say, someone
who can’t actually sing?
Well,
her “O Holy Night” happened to be the first song in our mini-marathon, and it
really does seem to have turned Christmas song interpretation into a kind of
vocal competitive gymnastics aimed strictly at showing off how much of the
singer’s five-octave vocal range can be used, not merely within this one
particular song, but within each measure of the song.
In
fact Mariah’s voice jumps around so much it sounds like somebody in the studio
is tickling her while she’s singing.
More
sedate than Mariah, and possibly less harmful to the general category, The
Carpenters’ version of “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” comes on
next, and it makes you think you’re listening to an Amtrak commercial rather
than a Christmas song (“From Atlantic to Pacific/Gee, the traffic is
terrific!”), so innocuous and manufactured it sounds.
Johnny
Mathis is similarly harmless, although his oddly eunuch-like voice can give you
the creeps, if you really think about it. Mercifully, his version of “It’s
Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” is short enough (2:16) that you don’t
think about it for long.
Now,
without Shazam we never would have known the precise time duration of that
song.
On
the other hand, we would we never have been able to identify the perpetrators
of what may be the single greatest travesty of the holiday season—Jessica
Simpson and Nick Lachey, singing “Baby it’s Cold Outside.”
“Singing”
is actually too strong a word for what they do. Simpson’s voice barely rises
above a whisper, and you cringe when she reaches for a note, although she does
manage to hit the last, sustained “outside,” no doubt thanks to the magic of
electronics.
Thus
the major downside of Shazam might be that it can promote distinctly
anti-social behavior: having correctly identified who was responsible for this
blight on holiday radio music, the listener might decide that if they ever ran
across the pair in his or her car while singing along with the radio too loudly
to notice, they wouldn’t stop to identify the bodies.
Fortunately,
the bad taste left by that so-called duet is washed away when Nat King Cole’s
“The Christmas Song” comes on next.
Thanks
to Shazam, we learn that this is actually the fourth version
Nat recorded. The man worked at his craft, and it shows. This is the best
version of the song on record, by anyone, and probably one of the two or three
best Christmas songs out there, period.
The
second those strings sweetly announce the tune, you relax, and by the time
Cole’s smoky, gorgeous voice begins to sing, you’re in a distinctly Christmas
mood like no other recording ever creates.
(Unfortunately,
the song’s actual writer, Mel Tormé, had the personality of a man perpetually
seething for not getting proper recognition for having written one of the most
popular Christmas songs of all time. We did not learn this from Shazam: we once
saw Tormé perform at a small lounge, during which he managed to mention that
he, not Nat King Cole, wrote “The Christmas Song”—as if this common
misperception was still on everybody’s mind 35 years later. When that news
flash did not seem to make the appropriate impression on the audience, he later
broke off singing to chew out a less-than-attentive audience member, completely
destroying the mood for the rest of the set.)
Like
that long-ago performance by the “Velvet Fog,” the pleasant sensation
left behind by Cole’s “Christmas Song” is quickly soured, this time by a male
singer performing “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow” in the manner of
Harry Connick, Jr. doing a second-rate version of Sinatra.
Who
is this guy, we wonder?
Shazam
tells us it’s Michael Bublé. We are pondering how such a vocal lightweight
became such a sensation in recent years—the answer must surely be electronics,
because his voice, very distinctly at times, sounds like it has been
synthesized—when John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas” comes on.
It’s
a great song, demonstrating as it does Lennon’s advice to David Bowie on how to
write a song: “Say what you mean, make it rhyme and give it a backbeat.” The
fact that Lennon had the best voice in rock and roll also helps.
Unfortunately,
his wife had the worst voice in rock and roll, and a brief downer it is when
Yoko comes in on the chorus like a banshee. (Fortunately she is quickly drowned
out by the children’s chorus from the Harlem Community Choir.)
The
other songs in our Shazam song-identification session are, we fear, too many to
relate.
Sinatra,
of course; Kelly Clarkson, an American Idol winner who essentially does a pale
Mariah Carey impersonation; Blandy—er, Andy Williams; and one of the best: Tony
Bennett.
Then
there’s Willie Nelson, who has a terrific, understated way of doing any song he
wants—but sounds completely out of place singing “Frosty the Snowman.” One
wonders exactly what kind of white powder Willie was thinking about while he
was recording this, if you get our drift.
Oh,
and there’s Coldplay’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which pairs
the sweetest piano with the worst voice in any single Christmas song we heard;
Amy Grant, a kind of female Andy Williams; the Ronettes, who are genuinely
terrific—a great beat, no nonsense, and Ronnie singing her heart out with that
New York accent; and then Mariah again, this time doing “Silent Night” with
that same roller-coaster vocal gargling.
Gene
Autry’s all-too-popular version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” would be bearable
except that he pronounces it “Santee Closs,” which is unfortunate in a song in
which that word appears like 274 times. ‘N Sync is likewise unbearable doing “O
Holy Night” a cappella, with harmonies the Brits would call cringe-making, and
Mariah-type warbling to boot.
Hall
& Oates’s “Jingle Bell Rock” is too easy to confuse with the other
versions of “Jingle Bell Rock”—thank you, Shazam, for clearing that up—while
Martina McBride manages to sound eerily like Barbra Streisand imitating Linda
Ronstadt singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
Winding
things down is Dan Fogelburg’s aforementioned “Same Old Lang Syne,” and here we
need to vent a little: something about the way he sings “liquor store”—he
pronounces it “leeker store”—never fails to provoke powerful radio-smashing
adrenalin surges.
Fortunately,
we suppress those urges today, because the Shazam experiment concludes with one
of the best Christmas songs ever recorded. Better than Bing, and maybe even
better than Nat, depending on your mood.
It’s
Bruce Springsteen. The Boss. Doing “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”…
live.
Yes,
this song was recorded live, and despite its age (more than 25 years old), the
thing still jumps out of the radio and grabs you.
Now,
as Shazam informs us, this particular recording was actually the B-side of a
single release called “My Hometown.” (Back in the day, kids, “singles” came
with two songs, one on each side of a record: the “A” side was intended to be
the hit song; the “B” side was, until the Beatles came along, for throwaway
stuff.)
Fortunately
nobody threw this one away.
Springsteen
begins the familiar song with some audience patter and actual jingle bells;
then he starts to sing and the band comes to life. Things move along smoothly
through the verse and chorus…until ace drummer Max Weinberg kicks it into
high gear and the band roars into a fast shuffle that takes the thing into a
different realm altogether.
Feeding
off the audience, The Boss sings so hard his voice slightly breaks at times.
Then he quiets down before roaring back into a tear-the-roof-off chorus,
sometimes dropping words and laughing as he goes.
This
is real music—recorded in 1975 during a concert at the C.W. Post College—with
no retakes, no production effects, and no electronic vocal repairs, either.
Try
doing that some time, Jessica and Nick.
Actually,
come to think of it, please don’t.
Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all.
Jeff
Matthews
Author
“Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”
(eBooks
on Investing, 2014) Available now at Amazon.com
© 2015 NotMakingThisUp, LLC