[On July 30, 1942, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” was released. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Crosby’s classic and other Christmas and holiday songs, for a little flavor of the season here in mid-summer!]
On an
authentically wonderful holiday ballad, and the frustrating tradition it helped
create.
First things
first, lest I call down the wrath of the Lambs upon me: I wrote in
my Valentine’s series a few years back about how much I had come to
appreciate and enjoy the music, and especially the songwriting skills, of Ms.
Mariah Carey. Before I get to her perennially chart-topping Christmas classic,
I’d ask you to check out that post for my overall thoughts on Carey’s
impressive talents and career.
Welcome
back! In 1994, with her career still relatively young but her place on the
music scene already well-established, Carey decided to make her fourth studio
album a Christmas album, with the lead single a new holiday classic. That album
became Merry Christmas
(1994) and the song, recorded in August but released as a single on October 29th,
was “All I Want for
Christmas Is You.” While it had been a while since there had been a truly
smash new Christmas track—probably dating back a decade earlier, to Wham!’s “Last Christmas” (1984)—the
idea of popular artists recording such songs was obviously not new (cf. the
1940s Bing Crosby classic that’s the reason for this seasonal series). And
Carey’s Christmas song blended perfectly her signature sound and vocals with
classic Christmas carol vibes, making it, as The New
Yorker would later put it, “one
of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon.” And canonical it has
certainly become—there’s a running joke that the Christmas season truly begins
each year when Carey’s song is first played, and it’s no joke how much it
dominates the charts late in the year every year.
It is
likely quite difficult to understand today how much of a risk Carey was taking
with this music; as her longtime songwriting partner Walter
Afanasieff later noted, “Back then, you didn’t have a lot of artists with
Christmas albums. It wasn’t a known science at all back then.” Thanks in no
small measure to the massive success of Carey’s song and album—indeed, I would
argue thanks almost entirely to that—the opposite has become true over the
subsequent quarter-century: now, countless artists put out Christmas
songs if not entire
Christmas albums every year, following a very well-established and –trodden
formula, a known science if there can be ever such a thing for hit records. Again,
popular musicians and bands have put out Christmas and holiday songs for at
least a century, so each and every one of these individual artists has every
right to do so as well. But the cumulative effect has been to so thoroughly
saturate the market that not only do none of the individual songs or albums
stand out, but the very idea of a Christmas carol or a holiday anthem, of a
song written to celebrate this particular occasion, feels that it’s become just
another part of the music industry machine. And that is most definitely not all
I want for Christmas.
Next
holiday song tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other holiday songs you’d analyze?
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