In past years I used to occasionally interrupt my attempts at Christmas shopping by going into a record store and picking up a new seasonal tape or CD. You know: "Oh look, so-and-so has a Christmas album, I wonder if it's any good, it'd be nice to have some more of that stuff to listen to at this time of year." These years I do it at the iTunes store. One advantage is that you can hear a little sample first.
Most of it disappoints. You understand, all I ask for is a few good songs per album, but even so it's a crap shoot. There was the Roches' collection We Three Kings: They sounded like they were making fun of both the music and themselves in every song. Forget it.* And Linda Ronstadt's A Merry Little Christmas: Well, maybe I should have seen that one coming; she's got a way of coating a song in sugary sentiment anyway, and then you put that on top of Christmas and it crosses some horrible threshold ... It's like holiday food. You take for granted that you'll be eating more sugar and more fat than usual, but even so there are moments when it's just too much, even for a guy like me.
That line between "What a delicious holiday treat!" and "Help, I can't stand it! Get this away from me!" is a fine line, and of course it depends on the beholder and on the beholder's mood. Bette Midler made an album called Cool Yule. I have had it for a few years. I had been remembering it as almost in the Ronstadt category, but I listened to it right through yesterday and almost none of it had seriously ill effects. There are a couple of songs there that I'm not sure I would ever want to hear again. And I'm not saying I want to hear her special Christmas version of Nanci Griffith's From a Distance more than, say, three or four times in the season; it resembles an apple pie covered with butter frosting, and it's got incongruous bits of other songs stuck in it like sugarplums. But I'm glad it's there. Her Mele Kalikimaka is perfectly fine, although I can't help hearing it as a slightly pale imitation of the Bing Crosby version. In the case of that song, if you're not going to depart further than that from the canonical version, what's the point? The same applies to I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm; in this case it's the Dean Martin version that is the reindeer in the room. But I'm really liking her I'll be Home for Christmas and What Are You Doing New Year's Eve? They're neither better nor worse than, respectively, Bing's and Ella's: a bit heavily frosted, but yummy.
In the course of singing a duet with Johnny Mathis, a medley of Winter Wonderland and Let it Snow, Bette calls Mathis "The King of Christmas". Which led me to check out his Christmas stuff. Well, it may be too soon to say, but so far I'm disappointed. Maybe I need to get used to the pace, which is slow, and to that weird way he has of sliding up or down on a note as he modulates to a new key. In any case, it's not a total loss. For one thing, his Sleigh Ride is a keeper. For another, he includes (between two verses!) that intro to WW. At last I have the tune! Oh, and I'm putting his Chestnuts in with all those others (and taking out a couple -- the Crosby/Sinatra and the Brubeck).
* One bright spot: They sing the intro of Winter Wonderland ("Over the ground lies a blanket of white, ... Two hearts are thrilling, in spite of the chilling weather ..."), which I never knew before. I was happy to find it, but frustrated by the fact that they do it in a kind of three-part harmony that leaves me wondering which of the three parts is the melody.
A Salt Hygrometer
19 hours ago
6 comments:
empty: does your musical taste in general tend towards the mellifluous? You keep stressing how sugary everything is. You go through these Christmas song collections as if they were boxes of chocolates. You claim to be satisfied when you find just a few that you especially like, but the fact is that you always eat the whole box.
Youthful overindulgence in loud music can damage the ears. It might be that overindulgence in Christmas cloy will rot your incisiveness. Then you couldn't handle tougher harmonies.
Of your musical analyses, I prefer the ones that are less incidental. My own biters are rather the result of neglect than of excess.
I'm not sure that I know what the word "biter" means here.
Sweetness is not the only relevant axis; it's just the one that I chose to grind this time. In fact what puts me off about most of the Johnny Mathis collection, and more or less all of the Nat King Cole, and much of the Bing Crosby, is not a cloying quality but something(s) else that I have not tried hard enough to find words for.
Thanks for the warning. I will try to take better care of my incisors.
It may also be true that my taste runs to the mellifluous, but I think I'm too close to myself to know. The other night I uncharacteristically attended a "classical" music concert -- actually baroque -- and mellifluous is a great word for what appealed to me about it. Rich soupy sweeps of harmonious melodious rhythmic togetherness on the part of a chamber orchestra.
But this is no way to be spending a Saturday afternoon. I should be paying attention to my child or preparing for the coming snowstorm, or both.
The word should have been choppers, not biters (Ger. loc.).
Oh, that kind of biter. For a while I was trying to imagine that in your own efforts at incisive analysis you sometimes commit "biters" through neglect.
The great thing about Itunes for me is being able to buy just a couple of songs off an album rather than the whole thing. Conversely, the great thing about albums was that you were forced to listen to songs you didn't already know.
Off topic, but here is a mathematical Grook from Piet Hein:
A half is,
this never alters,
exactly two thirds
of three quarters.
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