ELRR Graveyard

This blog is no longer active. It's pretty much just a bunch of drunken idiocy mixed with senseless ramblings. A more refined blog can be viewed at riraho.blogspot.com.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Blue Christmas...Music

Well it's once again that time of year. The Holiday Season. Family and Friends. Getting presents.

Christmas music.

All told, I cannot stand Christmas music. I could go as far as to say I despise it, but that would depend on how many times I had heard Jingle Bell Rock on that given day.

I'm not saying every Christmas song is horrible. Just 99.99% of them. Snoopy vs. the Red Baron Christmas is fantastic. The 12 Pains of Christmas is great--if only because the guys who yell "Hangovahs!" and "Stale TV Specials" both sound like Liberace. I enjoy Blue Christmas by Elvis *and* Porky Pig. I also enjoy, randomly and inexplicably, the "I Had Christmas Down in Africa" song.

The rest is trash.

The thing that gets me is the way the songs sound. If it I wasn't for the actual words connotation Christmas, would you ever listen to the songs in a million years in August? Could you imagine Jay-Z or Justin Timberlake being a star if they sang their songs in the same manner, tempo, tune or style that Andy Williams sings Silver Bells? They'd be shot without trial!

While we're at it, I might as well make a list. Under no circumstances do I want to hear any of the following:

-Thirteen different versions of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer. Thirteen versions! Can you imagine hearing more than one version of MacArthur's Park or some other equally horrendous song? What makes it worse is if there is an actual version of a song that I do like, I end up hearing one of the 45 others, which means I can forget hearing the one I like for the rest of the day.

-The recording of White Christmas that Bing Crosby made on wax cylinders in his basement in 1929.

-The Figgy Pudding song. I can't even figure out what figgy pudding is, let alone wonder why the singer nearly wants to stage a sit-in unless he gets some right here.

-Anything by Josh Groban. That goes double for his non-Christmas music.

-Hard Candy Christmas by Dolly Parton. If something is going to get me into the Christmas spirit it's definitely not this song, which sounds like Dolly trying to talk herself out of hanging herself in her barn.

And do not get me started on Christmas music with no words. Yeah, I'm talking to you Manheim Steam Rollers. What a waste! Not only are you going to waste my valuable hearing on horrible Christmas music, but you're going to compound it with instrumentals?! I might as well listen to Handl or Tchaikovsky!

I might have a better shot of avoiding it altogether, but damned if the radio at work, approx. five feet away from me, isn't playing 101.3 The Rose, Lancaster's Christmas station. Oh yeah, they play nothing but Christmas music. It started at Thanksgiving and runs all the way to New Years!

Now I'm forced to use the Zune more often, which is a pain in the rear to keep the ear phones in all the time. It also sucks that it’s not working all that properly after I slammed it a few times the other day because my lap top wasn’t recognizing it as being connected, which in turn prevented me from adding any new songs. I figured it out, but I tell you what, computers make me insane. Let’s not get into that though, that’s a whole different post altogether.

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