B-Sides For X-Mas

Part advent calendar, part dumping ground for all the weird and wonderful Christmas music I have accumulated. 100% Celine Dion-free, and that is a promise.

Bryan Adams, 1985 — I told you there’d be Bryan Adams. In a shining example of the over-wrought power balladry that made your sister cry in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, who else (besides perhaps Adam Sandler) would have absolutely no problem belting out lines like “To see the joy in the children’s eyes/The way that the old folks smile/Says that Christmas will never go away”? It’s that rare combination of glittering generalities and queasy sentimentality that earns Bryan Adams his rightful place as chaplain aboard the SS Holiday Cheese.

Part advent calendar, part dumping ground for all the weird and wonderful Christmas music I have accumulated. 100% Celine Dion-free, and that is a promise.

Bob Loftis, 1974 — The premise is simple: contrary to popular belief, Santa Claus is in fact a Texan, and something of a cowboy, though instead of roping/herding cattle, he laughs a lot and sings for his herd of reindeer. As they say, everything’s bigger in Texas, and you can’t get much bigger than Santa. This is a novel idea, of course, but Loftis presents practically zero evidence to back up his claim — even the anecdotal evidence you’d expect to be in a song devoted to the subject — so I’m unconvinced.

Part advent calendar, part dumping ground for all the weird and wonderful Christmas music I have accumulated. 100% Celine Dion-free, and that is a promise.

Prince and the Revolution, 1984 — Revolution-era Prince sings to his dead girlfriend, reminiscing about swimming and gambling (well, pokeno). We’re not sure if it was pneumonia or strep throat that did her in, but Prince admits to spending the last seven years drinking himself blind on banana daiquiris and admiring her younger sister. Fa la la la la, la la, la la.

Part advent calendar, part dumping ground for all the weird and wonderful Christmas music I have accumulated. 100% Celine Dion-free, and that is a promise.

Lou Monte, 1967 — One of the most important functions of art is to help us convey complicated ideas in a meaningful way, forging relationships and bridging gaps of time, space, and culture. Lou Monte wrestled with such an idea: how would Santa’s reindeer cope with the rocky terrain of the Italian peninsula? While the answer might seem obvious (Santa’s reindeer can fly), Lou Monte goes deeper than that, and tells us a story about a donkey. A christmas donkey.

Part advent calendar, part dumping ground for all the weird and wonderful Christmas music I have accumulated. 100% Celine Dion-free, and that is a promise.

Kurtis Blow, 1979 — Ignore the obvious pun in the title and the lack of any discernable hook, this novelty track was perhaps the first charting hip-hop single, ever. (Rapper’s Delight, the first hip-hop single to hit gold record status, was released a month or so later.) Its success launched the career of hip-hop pioneer Kurtis Blow, and introduced middle America to the awkward, angular cadence and barely-reinvented disco of early hip-hop. And like every other early hip-hop track, listen closely for the parts the Beastie Boys have sampled. (Hold it now…)

Part advent calendar, part dumping ground for all the weird and wonderful Christmas music I have accumulated. 100% Celine Dion-free, and that is a promise.

Bob Rich, 1970 — We’ve seen this one before — it came to my attention last year about three weeks too late. So to start off this year’s round of holiday goodness, here it is again. Information on this track is scarce, but it sports some unapologetically deep lyrics: “I’ve got Christmas in my pants/and my hands on my hips/I’ve got Easter for a zipper/and Shakespeare’s upper lip.” Whoa.