Musical Ipecac! (Bad Christmas Music for Your Listening Pleasure)

As the Christmas season draws to a near close, where some people are putting the finishing touches on their holiday shopping and others are just now getting started, I’m sure that the last thing that your frayed nerves can handle right about now is another minute of piped-in Christmas music.

Lucky for you, we’ve got a goodly bit of it below the jump!

Don’t get us wrong – there’s a lot of Christmas music that’s quite good.

Lucky for you, none of it is below the jump!

But just like any other kind of music, there’s good deal of it that’s just plain awful. Some of it is considered to be “holiday classic” and gets dredged up year after year. Others were quickly forgotten and destined for the dustbins of music history, only to be eventually rediscovered by aficionados of bad music and record collectors with a penchant for the completely inexplicable and bizarre. Some of it is so bad that it’s good. Others, not so much.

A few nights ago over seafood and tasty beverages, we started brainstorming and I think that we came up with a decent list of Christmas music that, if we had our druthers, we’d never have to hear again for the rest of our lives. Join us after the jump and dive into some of what we consider the worst Christmas music ever committed to recording media. The cream of the crock, as it were.

1. Tiny Tim, “Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS This Year”: Easily one of the worst Christmas songs ever written or recorded. Appropriately, this comes from an album called “Celebrities at Their Worst, Volume 2″. Scarily enough, this song was actually released as the B-side of a 1985 single, “She Left Me with the Herpes”. Ugh.
2. Band Aid, “Do They Know it’s Christmas?”: Oh God, it’s a charity single! Run for your life! The jury’s still out whether this was more effective as a tool for fundraising or a tool for raising awareness toward famine and poverty, but one thing is for certain – something like twenty-six hundred tools showed up to completely cancel out any of the talent that went into the writing and recording of this steaming chunk of doggerel. Bonus point for the lesson in regional climate differences, specifically the fact that there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime. Feh. There probably won’t be any snow here in Asheville either.
3. Mannheim Steamroller, “Deck the Halls”: What is it about Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas music and dentist’s offices? Maybe it’s because the band is led by a guy named Chip. My wife told me that she had all four of her wisdom teeth extracted with this playing in the background, and I seem to recall a root canal or two to the tune of this stuff. Bob Moog once made an observation, after seeing a rash of half-assed instrumental novelty albums of popular songs recorded on one of his namesake instruments during the sixties and seventies, that his name was on a lot of bad albums. In 1984, a band that would later go on to become the vanguard of the burgeoning “New Age” genre hit their stride with a Christmas album that… sounds a lot like one of those bad albums with Bob Moog’s name plastered on it. It may just be me, but “Mannheim Steamroller” sounds a little too close to “Cleveland Steamer” for my liking.
4. Trans-Siberian Orchestra, “The Carol of the Bells”: Finally, something that your grandmother and those cousins of yours from the shallow end of the gene pool who like to huff gasoline in the tool shed and hang dogs with David Huckabee can gather around the old Victrola and listen to. Here, the sweeping majesty of seventies progressive rock meets the low-end bombast of late eighties speed metal and the standard repertoire of a pops orchestra in this perfect example of excessive excess. In the words of Jello Biafra, “Rick Wakeman, eat your heart out!” Personally, I’ll take the “Ding! Fries Are Done!” guy over this any day of the week.
5. The Beach Boys, “Little Saint Nick”: If you’re one of those people who think that “Kokomo” is their worst song, we invite you to take a second listen to this. This obvious holiday cash-in on a previous hit (the already mediocre “Little Deuce Coupe”) is not one of Brian Wilson’s best moments as a songwriter – but then knowing the history of the Wilson family dynamic it might be safe to say that it was written under duress, with Murry looming over him wielding a 2×4 and Mike Love sitting there with a stupid grin on his face as if to say that this was the best song ever written by anyone, anywhere, anytime. He probably likes aerosol cheese.
6. David Seville & the Chipmunks, “The Chipmunk Song”: The only real plus about this song was that Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. (aka David Seville) was one of the first record producers to experiment with tape speed manipulation in pop music (he used the same technique with his earlier novelty single, “The Witch Doctor” – you know, “Ooo Eee, Ooo Aaa Aaa, Ting Tang, Walla Walla Bing Bang”) and this single opened the door for a lot of other artists to incorporate different and unusual sounds into their work. Here, that innovation was squandered on a trio of annoying, albeit highly profitable, rodents. The fact that a recent CGI-heavy film about said vermin was released starring Jason Lee and David Cross goes to show that even after almost fifty years, there’s still no accounting for public taste.
7. Little Cindy, “Happy Birthday Jesus”: I wouldn’t have known about this track if it weren’t for John Waters. A few years ago he released a various artists compilation CD called, naturally, A John Waters Christmas, where he presented some of the gems of his thrift-store holiday record collection. This is not one of the gems. Granted, we have absolutely no problem with songs of praise, but this particular piece of syrupy greeting-card prose would probably be too much for even the most devout Christian. This is something that would come in handy for those times when you have a couple of party guests that just won’t leave.
8. Nassiri, “Happy Birthday Jesus”: You’re sensing a theme, I’ll bet. If you’re like us, you probably saw the commercial for this guy’s holiday album ad nauseum on MSNBC over the last couple of weeks. I hope for his sake that the rest of his album isn’t anywhere near as bad as this ESL poetry assignment set to a beat that was likely borrowed from a Right Said Fred record. But I have a feeling that it probably is. I can’t stress enough the fact that we have absolutely no problem with songs of praise, but something like this really lowers the bar to previously unknown depths.
9. Elmo & Patsy, “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”: This was a great song the first three hundred times I heard it. Now, an estimated 600,000 listens later, I start to wonder about quick and efficient ways to open a vein whenever this comes on.
10. Kenny G, “Auld Lang Syne (The Millennium Mix)”: Technically not a Christmas song, true, but even still I know I’m not alone in my derision toward the platinum-selling, reverb-soaked blandness that this shaggy, grinning buffoon manages to extrude from of his soprano saxophone. In an arrangement of this New Year’s Eve warhorse that makes Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians seem edgy by comparison, here he takes it one step further and burys himself in the mix as soundbites from years gone by, from Thomas Edison recording himself reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to then-Vice President Gore reacting to the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO all but drown out every note. Suddenly, something that would normally be the perfect musical accompaniment to an evening of wine coolers and Pictionary becomes a topical, poignant and important musical statement. It’s a cheap and all-too-transparent ploy, and the results have been known to send people with stronger stomachs than I have into violent convulsions and G.I. spasms. Maybe next time I eat too much cheese, I’ll put this on and hope for speedy relief. Until then, no thanks.