I've decided to rank the most depressing Christmas songs in order of their depressive qualities, from least to worse. I have absolutely no idea if there are even more depressing Christmas songs out there; probably so. These are the ones I'm familiar with. Please feel free to add your own in comments. And go ahead, dispute my rankings. We're all friends here.
I understand full well that for someone suffering illness, loneliness, grief, any of the many ills that plague us in this fallen world, that the most depressing carols may be the most cheerful, mocking our misery. If you're stuck in Saskatchewan on this second day of winter and dealing with seasonal affective disorder, "Mele Kalikimaka" might be the cruelest thing you could hear. If that is where you find yourself, I am heartily sad for you. However, my mission today is to find songs that can ruin Christmas even if everything is going well, all by their miserable little selves. So here are my picks:
Depressing Christmas
"A Christmas Carol" - Tom Lehrer's mockery of the Christmas celebration is only mildly depressing, since it is pretty funny and contains some of his trademark clever rhymes ("Relations, sparing no expensell / Send some useless old utensil / Or a matching pen and pencil"). It also contains the earliest known (to me) poop joke in popular music ("Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle / Driving his reindeer across the sky / Don't stand underneath when they fly by"). It's not a bad song, but it may take some wind out of your Christmas sails.
"Here Comes Fatty Claus" - Hard to top this one for negativity about the holiday season, unleavened by any cleverness. Makes you laugh the first time you hear it, then never again.
"Father Christmas" - The Kinks' 1976 ditty features violence against a department store Santa by children, followed with a plea for charity to these same thugs. Its humor keeps it up as high as #3, but really, it paints a bleak picture of Christmas in the UK, at least in the 1970s.
"In the Bleak Midwinter" - And speaking of bleak, this poem by the wonderful Christina Rossetti has been used for a dirge-like hymn for a long time now, and yet it takes too many liberties. It paints the midwinter scene beautifully -- "Earth stood hard as iron. Water like a stone." And I know the midwinter is a metaphor. But a metaphor has to be true on both ends, and Christmas Day is exactly four days into winter. You know what the temperature forecast for Jerusalem is this Christmas? Sixty degrees Fahrenheit. I'm not saying it can't be cold there, or that we know that Jesus was born on the day we celebrate as his birthday (we don't, but could be), but Rossetti's poem only works properly if it really is as cold in Bethlehem as it is in our sinful hearts. So it's wrong and sad at the same time. The most common music with the poem is from Gustav Holst, best known for The Planets, who was an amazing composer but not a merry, sprightly type.
"I'll Be Home for Christmas" - A sad, longing song about not being home for Christmas, it made me sad when I first heard it as a kid, at an age where I kind of wouldn't have minded being away from my family for Christmas. (Which I would have regretted had it happened, but you know how kids are.) Even sadder when you know it was written in 1943, during World War II, and how many Americans fighting in Europe and the Pacific and everywhere else who heard the song never did get home for Christmas, ever.
"Do They Know It's Christmas?" - A friend of a friend was in the Peace Corps, and my pal passes along his assessment of this 1984 drek: "It represents the worst form of patronizing arrogance and paternalism and feeds the savior complex of many international development professionals. It is a vile song that will cause me to walk out of a room." Plus, most of Ethiopia is Christian, so I think they'd gotten the message that it was Christmas. And, if it weren't for the God-damned Soviet Union there might never have been a famine. But don't let that stop your wealthy Western guilt; the accusatory nature of depressing Christmas songs will be visited again below. Meanwhile, Sir Bob Geldof got rich and got a knighthood. Hey, you don't get to be Sir Bob for "I Don't Like Mondays," do you?
"Blue Christmas" - If, like me, you grew up thinking that this song sprang like Athena from the dark-browed forehead of King Elvis, you too are mistaken. "Blue Christmas" was first recorded by Doye O'Dell, and you can read the rest of its winding history thanks to the unbeatable Mark Steyn, who mentions everything about the song worth knowing except that it's the only song used in Rankin-Bass's The Year Without a Santa Claus that was not written by Jules Bass and Maury Laws. Anyway, its brokenheartedness earns it a spot on our depressing list, but its bitterness ("You'll be doing all right with your Christmas of white") keeps it from scoring higher on the Depress-O-Meter.
"Christmas Song" - The first of two by Jethro Tull, with the admission that Tull is one of my favorite bands EVAH!!😍 But what an anti-Christmas song front man Ian Anderson wrote here, for 1972's Living in the Past. You get the idea: "When you're stuffing yourself at the Christmas parties / You'll just laugh when I tell you to take a running jump" and "How can you laugh when your own mother's hungry? / How can you smile when your reasons for smiling are wrong?" It calls for a remembrance of Christ, but you can't take that seriously from a pretty obvious non-Christian. However, it does end with the call for "Santa! Pass us that bottle," baring the singer's own complicity in the revels. But Anderson would return with:
"Jack Frost and the Hooded Crow" - Almost a decade later this was recorded by Tull during the Broadsword and the Beast sessions, but it didn't make the album; it would appear as a B-side and on the band's box set released in 1988. This one goes straight to threats - your lack of charity could bring punishment from God, who'll take away all your good things and throw you in the gutter with the loathed punks ("The Lord may find you wanting / Let your good fortune disappear"). Eek! Sad and scary!
"Santa Can't Stay" - Dwight Yoakam's yuletide tribute to broken homes is funny, but of course it isn't. Yeah, Santa shows up drunk, like Mom expected, driving a car just like Dad's, and it's all seen from the point of view of the kids. But it is funny, especially when Santa "threw a present really hard that almost hit Mom's new boyfriend, Ray" (we are also told that Santa "might just beat the crap outta Ray"). But it's horrible too. But the music is festive! And it's awful. One of the great country music songs. Depressing.
"Please Come Home for Christmas" - It kind of figures that the first recording, from 1960, of this Christmas blues song would be from a guy named Charles Brown. No wonder he told Linus he couldn't understand Christmas in 1965. First the ironic start ("Bells will be ringing," the kind of observation that makes for happy Christmas songs and happy wedding songs), then you get it right in the teeth on line three ("My baby's gone, I have no friends"). Wow, you lost your woman and all your friends!? The title plea follows and we, the listeners, have little doubt that it will do no good at all. Next Christmas he'll be drunk and living in a box. And he'll be crying...
"Christmas Tears" - Yes, a year later, in 1961, Freddie King put out his own song of Christmas blues, blues that this singer has been carrying for years. "You been gone such a long, long time / But it's Christmas and I can't get you off of my mind / Seems like you been gone a hundred years or more / But if you were here with me now / I'd hang 'Merry Christmas' on my door". Not only did his woman leave, but he absolutely cannot get over it. Jeez, the next song up for this guy would be a holiday cut of "He Stopped Loving Her Today." Forget the wassail; pass the strychnine.
"Pretty Paper" - I have a somewhat limited appreciation for Roy Orbison, and this song is one of the reasons why. Seems to be Christmas as seen from the eyes of someone lonely, poor, drunk, stupid, God knows what else. Of course everyone ignores the pathetic reject. (Supposedly it was based on the really sad story of a handicapped seller of gift wrap, as detailed on Wikipedia, if you're not depressed enough.) It has the subtlety of an RAF Grand Slam bomb. Anyway, Willie Nelson wrote it, so maybe that explains it.
"I Believe in Father Christmas" - Emerson, Lake & Palmer's bitter little song to a cheerful melody has always depressed me. The singer apparently has lost faith in everything because it rained on Christmas. ("They said there'd be snow at Christmas... But instead it just kept on raining.") Okay. Actually, reading a little about the origin of the song has softened me on it, but it's still sad, disgruntled, and wet.
"Looking for Eden" - And here comes Ian Anderson again, this time from his solo album Walk Into Light, trying to get some of that ELP soggy Christmas money: "And where on earth are all those songs of Eden? / The fairy tales, the shepherds and wise men? / Just one old dosser lurching down Oxford Street / To spend his Christmas lying in the rain." Not only does Christmas suck, and everyone who celebrates it sucks, but it's just a pack of fairy tales. And it's raining. Kill me now.
"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" - And here we are at last, the only Christmas song by an ex-Beatle so bad it could almost make us forgive "Wonderful Christmastime," if it were possible to forgive "Wonderful Christmastime." John Lennon's soggy little paean to peace uses Christmas in a way that makes Willie Nelson look subtle, to tell us if we all decide not to have war, we will not have war. How simple! How easy! And guess what? If we all decide not to steal, we'll have no theft! If we all decide not to be jealous, we'll have no jealousy! But you know something? It only takes one side to start a war, and then everyone involved has to play along. Maybe on some other planet Lennon's ideas would have worked, but I live with human beings here on Earth. And the choir sucks too. I think the most depressing thing about this song is that people still seem to think it's profound. I liked it better as a Jamaican tourist jingle.
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You may have noticed one thing most of these songs have in common -- airplay. Some are hits, and kept their creators in royalties for life. Clearly there's a market for depressing Christmas songs. I'm working on one called "Strange Ornaments," in which Santa comes down the chimney to find a whole family has hanged themselves because of the horror of living in HERR TRUMP'S AMERIKKKA!!!!! I think it'll be big on college radio stations.
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"Christmas with the Devil" - Okay, if you take Spinal Tap seriously, this would be a horrible sentiment, and possibly depressing. But you can't, so it isn't. "The sugar plums are rancid / And the stockings are in flames!" Sure. Though I guess its bad taste could sour some people on Christmas. I think it's a funnier as an idea than in execution, but this really does sound like bad heavy metal.
"'Zat You, Santa Claus?" - A weird number, unlike any holiday song I know, with a totally a Halloween sound. First done with great pizzazz by the incomparable Louis Armstrong in 1953 and covered by everyone else since, even the Muppets. May leave you scratching your head, but the semi-implied threat doesn't make for depression. It does, however, seem to be particularly popular with people who hate Christmas.
"Christmas at Ground Zero" -Weird Al sings of the "crazy fluke" of the world being destroyed in a nuclear holocaust on "this jolly holiday." Really gets the '60s pop-Christmas sound down solid, so the parody music is on target. Kind of depressing, I guess, if you're worried about nuclear war, which we were more in 1986 when this song came out than in 2018, thank God.
"Another Christmas Song" - And here comes Ian Anderson AGAIN! This time from 1989's Rock Island, but by now Tull's flutemeister has gotten a little less petulant, and actually paints a poetical picture of the "Old Man" calling all his children home at Christmas, "proving that the blood is strong." And a sweet sentiment bordering on faith: "Everyone is from somewhere / Even if you've never been there." Of course, it wouldn't be an Anderson Christmas song without an accusation: "How many wars you fighting out there this winter's morning?" Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry we're not living up to your expectations.
"Xerox Xmas Letter" - This one's totally unfair, as it's funny and comes from Ray Stevens's Christmas Through a Different Window album. It's the supposed text of a pathetic family's annual photocopied letter that comes from the Christmas cards. I could see it maybe making you sad if that sounds like your family ("We took down the front yard tire swing / Now that Junior's in the pen / But it looks like a happy new year / They moved him off death row again!"). Then again, every song from the album could have that effect ("Bad Little Boy," "Guilt for Christmas," "I Won't Be Home for Christmas," "The Little Drummer Boy--Next Door," and so on). Hell, so could Tepper and Bennett's "Nuttin' for Christmas," if you've been a rotten little kid.
"Same Old Lang Syne" - Dan Fogelberg does meet his old love in the grocery store on Christmas Eve, but the title of this sad and wistful number says New Year's Eve. So, not quite eligible as a depressing Christmas song.
"Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto" - This ditty from the unexpected Christmas singer James Brown is not depressing at all, actually, unless the very idea of poor neighborhoods or ethnic ghettos is that depressing for you. If it is, don't listen to Run-DMC's "Christmas in Hollis" either.
"I'll Be Home for Christmas (Though Just in Memory)" - Wait, didn't we cover this? Yes, but no. This is the 1942 song by Buck Ram, awfully similar to the 1943 song by Walter Kent and Kim Gannon mentioned above, and if you think there had to have been a lawsuit, you are sooooo right. But this song doesn't have the heartrending quality of Kent and Gannon's song; it's more wistful than sorrowful, and it doesn't save the punch until the end ("though just in memory" is the second line; "if only in my dreams" is the last line of the latter song). Sad, yes, but not as sad, or as good.
Well, all right! That's enough depression! We need a pickup, quick, and that means the Drifters!
Phew! That was close. Thanks, Drifters! And Joshua Held (who did the animation)!
And if that's not enough, here's Lionel Hampton:
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