Five years ago, Destiny's Child released an album titled Eight Days of Christmas. Exactly what had happened to the missing 96 hours remained unclear, though ignorance of the yuletide calendar was less of an issue than the awfulness of the music. The title track, for example, rewrote the traditional ode to partridges and leaping lords as a celebration of bog-standard consumerism, in which the girls received such presents as "a pair of Chloe shades and a diamond belly ring," "a cropped jacket with dirty-denim jeans" and "the keys to a CLK Mercedes." The result was less Christ-in-a-manger than D-list celebrity in Selfridges: the festive season reduced to flimsy, plastic cliches that would surely be worn out by Boxing Day.
As far as big-league Americans are concerned, this kind of stuff has long been obligatory. The basic recipe — as also evidenced by, say, Christina Aguilera's My Kind of Christmas, which contains a stirring bit of fireside magic titled Xtina's Xmas — is simple enough: stick to the kind of music that has made your name, trowel on the icky sentimentality usually crystallized in seasonal Coca-Cola advertisements, and then watch the money roll in. Unfortunately, even the most godlike talents thereby sound like earthly fools. For example, you'd be forgiven for thinking a James Brown compilation titled Funky Christmas (put to tape between 1966 and 1970 and featuring a song called Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto) would be brilliant. If only: seemingly hacked out during spare studio time, it is woefully fun-free, and really rather embarrassing.
So, what to listen to come Christmas Day? In its 60-ish year history, post-Elvis popular music has rarely got Christmas right. Phil Spector's iconic 1963 album A Christmas Gift to You undoubtedly has its moments, Slade's perennial Merry Xmas Everybody perfectly encapsulates the hard-wrought pleasures of a British Christmas in the 1970s, and there is a case to be made for the usual selections from Wizzard, John and Yoko, the Pogues and — at a push — Wham. But that is largely it, and the small handful of songs that constitute the supposedly classic Christmas pop canon have long been so familiar that they have bred contempt. Besides, with only a few exceptions (such as 2000 Miles, the wonderfully wistful 1983 Pretenders hit whose Christmas references are almost incidental), pop music seems innately restricted to sleighbells and schmaltz. Whether late December is all about the (northern) winter solstice, the birth of Christ or nestling in the bosom of one's kin, there surely ought to be more to it than that.
PHOTO: AP
This year, however, brings a small handful of surprisingly satisfying Christmas albums: records that variously emphasize nostalgia, religious revelation, paganism, wintry melancholy and familial warmth.
Aimee Mann, the Los Angeles-based songwriter best known for her impossibly affecting soundtrack for Magnolia, recently released a 10-track Christmas companion called One More Drifter in the Snow, which partly amounts to an understated protest against the crimes against Christmas perpetrated by the modern music industry. "Whenever I hear a modern Christmas record, the very fact that they tried to modernize it makes me cringe," she says. "There's always somebody trying to go for a new twist. And I don't want a new twist on Christmas. Whatever it is, I want to be able to listen to it next to Johnny Mathis and Peggy Lee and Dean Martin."
Such is the explanation for her album's pared-down, distinctly pre-rock arrangements — though they're less central to the record's charm than its evocation of the mess of emotions that lie behind the seasonal dazzle. "Once me and my producer had discussed the music," she says, "the next thing was talking about what Christmas was like when we were kids. If you grew up in the 60s or 70s, your pivotal experience was the Charlie Brown Christmas special [A Charlie Brown Christmas, first televised in 1965]. It had Linus explaining the meaning of Christmas, so there was a bit of religious awe. And I remember all those shots of Charlie Brown walking round town alone: it had this very solitary, melancholy beauty. So we said, 'Well, it would be great if we could echo that feeling.' For some people, Christmas is all about sweetness: the tree is lit up, there's a fire, your parents aren't fighting for once, and it's awesome. But a lot of these songs have a real yearning quality — yearning for something that will never be."
In a very different setting, that same quality burns through some of the Christmas music drawn from the folk canon, showcased this year on a jaw-dropping box-set entitled Midwinter (pithily strap-lined "A celebration of the folk music and traditions of Christmas and the turning of the year"), and Holy Heathens and the Green Man, a pearling selection of music by Waterson Carthy, the quartet built around the folk godheads Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, their daughter Eliza Carthy and the vocalist and melodeon-player Tim van Eyken. It spans all four seasons, though its single biggest share is given over to the annual period of grim weather and long nights.
"I'm not a big fan of forced jollity," says Carthy. "With me, it's, 'Stop wearing that silly hat and jumping up and down, please. It's not going to make me any warmer.' These songs are supposed to remind you that it's midwinter, and there's not a lot of work around, and it's cold and dark. And if you're sitting at home by the fire, you might like to reflect on other people and feel a bit more charitable."
The yuletide material they've chosen falls into two categories: religious songs that draw on an austere, almost ascetic kind of Christianity, and a few pieces celebrating such non-Christian rituals as wassailing, whereby you knock on your neighbors' doors and musically request food and booze. "I love love-songs," says Carthy. "I think the best kind of music is devotional music, and I think some of those carols are really, really devotional. You can feel the passion in them.
"And it's the same with the more pagan stuff: what you're basically listening to is something that's so absolutely entrenched in somebody's family and social history. With some of those wassailing songs where they call out somebody's name, that's going to be somebody's name that goes back hundreds of years. And there's an absolute conviction about it: it's the right time of year, and this is the thing we do to bless the year to come. I love all of it, because I love devotional music — music that just has to be."
For some, of course, what Carthy calls "the darker, frosty stuff" might be a bit much — in which case, they should try some of the less austere albums saluted here: John Fahey's instrumental classic The New Possibility, Sufjan Stevens' endearingly whimsical box-set Songs for Christmas, or the cream of the festive reggae amassed by the Trojan label, at least some of it tinged with the out-there spirituality of Rastafarianism.
Oh, and some news just in: those who want no part of these delights and still cling stubbornly to the coke, crisps and crassness model of Christmas may like to sample Happy Holidays, a new album by the great Billy Idol. Its cover features the curly-lipped former gonzo-rock icon striking a Sinatra-esque pose in front of an antique microphone, while the record finds him doing his thing on very strait-laced readings of Frosty the Snowman, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and something called Jingle Bell Rock.
But be warned: the usual rules apply, and it's tripe.
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