Cleaning Up Christmas

Christmas is nearly here!

Deck the halls! Jingle the bells! Pluck the turkey, slaughter the fatted pig and roll out the credit card; the season of socially enforced goodwill is upon us.

It’s weird that there’s very little that’s “nice” about Christmas; yet if you stop to point this out, you are labelled a Grinch or a scrooge. Well, what can I say but bah! humbug!

We encourage children to be greedy, we enforce generosity, build temples of debt and condone alcoholism. All in the name of Jesus. Boy, I bet he is pissed.

Having said all that, I do like the music. Well, not really. Mostly it’s eight shades of shyte. We roll out the same carols each year and sing them without even thinking about the words.

You might be thinking here that I’m having a real negative attitude day. Well, you’d be right – I mean, have you seen the traffic out there? A guy got pissed at me yesterday just because I wouldn’t let him make an illegal lane change and cut me off on Brooklyn Hill. He followed me home, tailgating me and making obscene gestures. T’is the season in-effing-deed.

But what’s at the heart of this attitude? It’s that, as a child, nobody told me the lyrics. I hate that. You must explain the lyrics to your children.

Jingle Bells! Jingle Bells! Jingle all the way!
That’s easy enough, right?
Oh what fun it is to ride, on a one horse open sleigh!
Okay, now stop, and explain to the five-year-old from New Zealand, who’s never seen snow or a sleigh, what the crap you just sang. Why wouldn’t he be singing: “A one horse soap and sleigh” and wondering why the fuck Santa needs all that soap? What’s soap got to do with it? Did angels appear unto the shepherds and say: “Behold, in Bethlehem a child is born; best bring him a few bars of Knight's Castile.” Did Santa have to soap up the skids on his sleigh so it rode better?

Oh the hours of confusion that would have just been so easily solved if somebody had said: “It’s one horse OPEN sleigh… I know it sounds like we’re singing a one whore soap and sleigh; but we really aren’t.”

So there. I’ve made my point. It’s stuck with me forever, and I’m still bitter about it.

A Quick Lyric

OK, so I am behind on my blogging. I apologise.

And what’s worse is that The Darjeeling Ltd is coming on TV in like 10 minutes so I’m not going to give you a full-service blog right now anyway. Not that I have any topic to blog about except my current enjoyment of old songs.

For some reason my musical tastes rarely infringe upon the post-80s. The ‘60s rocked, but then, so did the ‘70s. For although the ‘70s gave us the musical mutilations of disco and punk (which disguised great music behind a wall of pointless attitude), it was a great decade.

Floyd did its best work in the ‘70s. So did Split Enz and, er, some other bands whose names currently escape me.

Yet what I’ve come to realise is that there is no reason to define music in terms of which decade it emerged. I have passion for The Beatles, The Stones and Led Zep. But, equally, I love Muse and Radiohead.

You can guitar solo me with Clapton and Frampton and Best, and I’ll give you Satriani, Vai and Johnson (that’s Eric, not Robert).

Truth is, music transcends. And that’s just one thing I love about it. I’m probably one of many who believe the film Almost Famous was written for me. I connect to it on an almost spiritual level. I guess that’s because it was written by somebody who loves music... almost as much as I do.