23 December 2021. Satire | Christmas songs
Seeing the year through the eyes of Cold War Steve | On the trail of ‘off-centre’ Christmas songs. And enjoy your holiday…
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
All the best for the holidays and the New Year. I’ll be back on 4th January, exactly one year after I started this newsletter.
#1: Seeing the year through the eyes of Cold War Steve
I know it’s conventional in these unpredictable times to channel Tom Lehrer and claim that ‘satire is dead’ in the face of increasingly outlandish actual events. But that’s not actually true.
So this last post of 2021 celebrates the work of the collage artist Cold War Steve, who has found a way to satirise the British government, and others. Here are some images from his version of 2021.
(COP26. Image © Col War Steve)
(Refugee ‘crises’. Image © Cold War Steve)
(Rupert and the rest. Image © Cold War Steve)
I’ve noticed that he has been getting darker as the year goes on, but that is clearly what the times require.
I hadn’t realised until I did some light research for this piece that doing these collages started as a form of therapy after a breakdown, or that before he adopted politics as his main subject matter he was initially obsesses by the British EastEnders soap character Phil Mitchell.
There’s a helpful profile by Maddy Mussen in Joe.
The real origin of Cold War Steve is much less flippant. It started in a hospital bed. After years of struggling with alcoholism and working odd jobs that never satisfied him (he’s been everything from a road worker to a probation officer), Chris suffered a breakdown in 2016 and attempted suicide. It was then that Cold War Steve was born.
“There are free iPhone apps where you can cut and paste things. I started messing around and found it strangely therapeutic.” Then one day he had an idea. What if he inserted Phil Mitchell into some Cold War backgrounds? So he did.
These aren’t subtle, of course. Johnson is increasingly seen with no clothes on; the far- right British Home Secretary Priti Patel cuddles up to Hitler. But these are the times we live in. And in times of real crisis, satire becomes more like Chris Morris, and less like Private Eye.
(Our ruling class. Image © Cold War Steve.)
The best way to follow him is on Twitter, where he is @ColdWarSteve. he also has an online shop.
#2: On the trail of the ‘off-centre’ seasonal song
For the last four years I’ve been compiling an “off-centre” Christmas/ holiday playlist, trying to escape from the limited repertoire of over-familiar songs you hear when you’re out and about, or more traditional renditions of carols.
It turns out that there are more of these off-centre songs than you’d expect—I’ve got through close to 200 in the four playlists, but I have a reservoir of several hundred more to go. And people do keep adding to the reservoir, often smuggling out seasonal records as singles in November.. (Links will mostly take you to Spotify). The 2021 playlist is here, by the way.
There’s really three sources for our current Christmas song repertoire: in reverse order, commercial songs out of Tin Pan Alley or the Brill Building (‘White Christmas’ or ‘Santa is Coming to Town’); the religious carols; and the midwinter folk songs (things like ‘Gaudete’, for example), which also includes songs which are basically about being cold (‘The Snow It Melts The Soonest’). There’s some cross over between the last two.
Elvis
The idea of doing Christmas records is pretty much as old as recordings, but the Christmas-themed long-player largely started in the 1950s, as the LP started to become the commercial recording medium of choice. Elvis, for example, did his first Christmas record in 1957, a mixture of commercial Christmas songs and religious ones, including some gospel.
The first Christmas concept album is probably Phil Spector’s. It’s problematic today, since Spector was a controlling, abusive man, and the knowledge of that takes much of the pleasure away from the zest the artists and the production bring to the songs. Incidentally, the record didn’t do well initially: it was released on the same day that Kennedy was shot and didn’t match the public mood.
Since then, pretty much every significant label has felt the need to release a Christmas album at some time (Motown, Stax), and it is easier to find recording artists who haven’t done one than who have.
My interest in the idea of the “off-centre” Christmas record came from an impatience with the relentless cheeriness of the big Christmas hits (I can’t think of anything worse than it being Christmas every day, for example. Yes, I know: bah humbug) and the cloying nature of most of the mainstream versions of the carols.
Optimism and realism
I think it was Auden who said that poetry is the exact expression of mixed emotions, and that is certainly my experience of Christmas. ‘Christmas must be something more’, as Taylor Swift sings. As holidays go, it is caught on the cusp of optimism and realism. Yes, the light will come back, and it will get warmer, and we’d like that to happen in our lives as well, but we know that’s not always true.
The off-centre songs I tend towards tend to be the ones that catch some of this. There are several types.
There are the ones that turn Santa into a social fact, with, sometimes, the regrets that go with it, such as Alison Krauss’ ‘Shimmy Down My Chimney Chimney’.
There are the ones that use the idea of Santa to make a social comment: ‘There Ain’t No Chimneys In The Ghetto’, by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, or Poly Styrene’s cover of ‘Black Christmas’.
(And more recently, on the principle of ‘Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner’, some feminist versions too.)
Christmas sentiment
There are those that contrast the sentiments of Christmas with the contrasting emotions of their own situation, of which Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’, covered endlessly and with good reason, is the supreme example.
There are those that are about the seasonal misfortunes of others—in jail, for example. See John Prine, or, on a similar theme, The Toasters. Or more broadly, Lindisfarne’s ‘Winter Song’.
And some just hate the whole holiday and everything in it. ‘Let’s skip Christmas this year’, sings Rodney Crowell.
But it’s not all gloom. There are also songs that are just fun—that play with the idea of Santa, or of Christmas. The one about Elvis as Santa in Sears, or Kate Rusby’s desire for a hippo for Christmas. (She may not have read the health and safety warnings: there are also other versions of this song).
And there are songs that are really more of a commentary on the whole Christmas season. Some of these are just descriptive, such as the lovely ‘Christmas in Killarney’, or, more sardonically Loudon Wainwright’s ‘Christmas Morning’.1 Nick Lowe made an entertaining record of these which starts with ‘I’m At The Airport For Christmas’.
Versions
My final category—and this isn’t quite a complete list—is versions of the existing repertoire that do something new with it. Obviously #TimesUp for the original version of ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’. It’s unlistenable now. But John Travolta and Olivia Newton John reversed roles in their version, and John Legend and Kelly Clarkson bring it completely up to date.
And I’m a sucker for songs that play around with the official versions of the songs—which might include a classic like Charlie Parker’s ‘White Christmas’ (was he really playing live on Christmas Day?)—or Kaskade’s version of ‘Jingle Bells.
I tend to be more patient with the traditional repertoire, partly because it’s under-represented, partly because there’s generally a toughness to these songs. A favourite record here is the Waterson’s Frost and Fire, which replaced Phil Spector on our Christmas morning journey, or John Fitzpatrick’s Wassail.
And to my surprise, the recent seasonal record that hits many of these notes is Strange Communion by Thea Gilmore.
But my favourite off-centre Xmas record is still Ze Records A Christmas Record, released in 1981. Ze was a hip and left field New York label, which you’d have thought would have stayed away from such festive froth. But no:
I found it hard to imagine John Cale and Lou Reed sitting around a Christmas tree exchanging gifts with Nico and tucking into a turkey dinner, the same goes for the members of the Stooges or MC5... Only the painter Guy Peellaert could have imagined such a scene. And yet my teenage heroes all took part in the Christmas song tradition: Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, Elvis.(...) In 1981 and 1982 ZE Records published its own Christmas album under the supervision of Michael Zilkha. All the American artists on ZE answered the call and came up with a Christmas track.
The Ze record is the source of ‘Christmas Wrapping’ which has become a classic. And also of the best single Christmas record ever, by Davitt Sigerson, seen at the top of this post. As he says:
It’s a big countryMerry Christmas everybodyJust a word from me and Ann to say we’re fine.
j2t#234
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I was once rebuked, with friends, from the stage by Loudon Wainwright after he’d sung this song. Not our fault: the venue had put us in the wrong seats and tried to sort it out noisily during the song. Loudon wasn’t pleased.