Circadian Shift

December is here, which means that we'll now fully enter into the throes of the holiday season. And that means Christmas songs, for better or for worse. Often worse.

Here are three Christmas songs that particularly get up my nose:

• "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" -- So, let's see if I got this straight. Rudolf is a reindeer who is different from the others, so he gets mocked and abused by them. Then he goes and does something cool -- with no help from anyone, thank you very much -- and suddenly everybody is his new best friend. Right. Stupid, fickle, asshole reindeer. I hope Rudolf told them to go fuck themselves.
• Paul McCartney - "Wonderful Christmastime" -- Mr. McCartney crafted some truly fine pop songs, back in the day, but this is not one of them. Everything about this track -- production values, melody, lyrics -- has "wanking about in the studio between takes of something else" written all over it. It's not a bad song, but there was a time when Sir Paul was capable of writing so much better.
• Bryan Adams - "Christmas Time" -- Whereas McCartney's ditty can be excused for being a diversionary throwaway piece, you just know that Bryan Adams sat down and tried really, really hard to pen a holiday anthem of peace, brotherhood, the warm-and-fuzzies, etc. What we wind up with instead is a maudlin, formulaic, piece of crap. Every time I hear a blatantly manipulative line like "to see the joy in the children’s eyes", I want to hunt down Mr. Adams and beat him about the head with a Yule log.

As mentioned a few weeks back, I have an assemblage of Xmas tunes that I've been working on. I'm ironing out a few things, but it will be up soon.