{"id":929,"date":"2006-12-15T11:12:49","date_gmt":"2006-12-15T11:12:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/15\/the-christmas-tunes-experiment-1\/"},"modified":"2006-12-15T11:12:49","modified_gmt":"2006-12-15T11:12:49","slug":"the-christmas-tunes-experiment-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/15\/the-christmas-tunes-experiment-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Christmas Tunes Experiment: Results"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, what are the results of the Christmas Tunes Experiment? I&#8217;ve had a playlist of the songs on the <a href=\"http:\/\/jefitoblog.com\/blog\/?p=989\">Jefitoblog Holidy Mix Tape<\/a> (plus a few other things) locked into the iTunes Party Shuffle while I work on the computer at home. At work, I stuck with the usual four-and-five-star playlist in the lab, because, well, the lab is not the place to debut new music.<\/p>\n<p>The results were pretty mixed, but not as bad as I feared it might get. The list, with commentary on each song, is reproduced below the fold.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Les Brown And His Band Of Renown &#8211; I&#8217;ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm (Psapp&#8217;s Lady Remix). I have to say, I don&#8217;t really get the whole &#8220;remix&#8221; thing. All too often, it just seems like they took a perfectly servicable song, stripped out the bass and drums, and plugged in a drum machine. Other times, like this one, I can&#8217;t really tell what might&#8217;ve been done. This is a low-key jazz sort of thing, and it&#8217;s actually pretty good.<\/li>\n<li>The Weepies &#8211; All I Want. Pretty good indie style Christmas tune. All that the singer wants is apparently &#8220;to be Neko Case,&#8221; but there are worse ambitions.<\/li>\n<li>Squirrel Nut Zippers &#8211; Winter Weather. A vampy little number from one of the swing revival bands from the late 90&#8217;s. Inoffensive.<\/li>\n<li>Peggy Lee &#8211; I Like A Sleighride (Jingle Bells). You know, there just really isn&#8217;t much that you can do to make &#8220;Jingle Bells&#8221; not be stupid.<\/li>\n<li>Slade &#8211; Merry Xmas Everybody. So, imagine, say, Whitesnake circa 1992 sitting down and trying to write John Lennon&#8217;s &#8220;Happy Christmas (War is Over).&#8221; You get the idea.<\/li>\n<li>Nancy Wilson &#8211; The Christmas Waltz (Away Team Remix). This is a drum-machine sort of remix. It&#8217;s not particularly good or bad.<\/li>\n<li>Barenaked Ladies &#8211; Hanukkah O Hanukkah (live). A live recording of a song attempting to elevate a rather minor Jewish holiday to major status, in order to make living in North America a little more tolerable.<\/li>\n<li>Aretha Franklin &#8211; Winter Wonderland. This is not one of the more successful updates of an older song that I&#8217;ve ever heard. The update to &#8220;as we grooooooove by the fire&#8221; is pretty cringeworthy.<\/li>\n<li>Jethro Tull &#8211; Ring Out, Solstice Bells. This is pretty much what you&#8217;d expect from asking the guy behind <cite>Aqualung<\/cite> to write a Christmas tune. It&#8217;s rather pointedly a <b>solstice<\/b> song, not a Christmas one, and other than that sounds like Jethro Tull.<\/li>\n<li>Ella Fitzgerald with The Frank Devol Orchestra &#8211; What Are You Doing New Year&#8217;s Eve. Sounds like, well, Ella Fitzgerald. It ought to be set over some black-and-white movie footage.<\/li>\n<li>The Waitresses &#8211; Christmas Wrapping. Still a world of pain.<\/li>\n<li>Deegan DeWitt &#038; The Sparrows &#8211; Christmas Light. Another sort of low-key indie-ish singer-songwriter kind of song. Pretty good, as far as it goes.<\/li>\n<li>Charles Brown &#8211; I&#8217;ll Be Home for Christmas (Ohmega Watts Remix). Much better than the description &#8220;re-inventing the song you&#8217;re thinking of to involve looped verses and a thumping hip-hop beat&#8221; would make it sound.<\/li>\n<li>Zakk Wylde &#8211; White Christmas. Back in college, my friend Paul had an answering machine message that was about three minutes worth of classical guitar, after which he said &#8220;Isn&#8217;t acoustic guitar swell? Leave a message after the beep.&#8221; That&#8217;s what this makes me think of.<\/li>\n<li>The Nat King Cole Trio &#8211; All I Want For Cristmas (Is My Two Front Teeth) (MJ Cole Remix). This is one of the bad kind of remixes, where they took scratchy thirty-year-old vocals, and put them over a generic drum machine beat. Nat King Cole had enough style that if you don&#8217;t pay close attention, you don&#8217;t realize the sheer horror of what he&#8217;s singing.<\/li>\n<li>Fats Domino &#8211; Frosty The Snowman. This has a &#8220;remix&#8221; sound to it, but isn&#8217;t listed as one. There&#8217;s this odd little hitch in the lyrics, though&#8211; sort of a one-second gap between lines every now and then&#8211; and the drums sound almost synthesized. I&#8217;m surprised that it&#8217;s not.<\/li>\n<li>Don Dixon &#8211; I Saw Three Ships. Sounds enough like <cite>Dream of the Blue Turtles<\/cite> era Sting that I had to check the artist name the first five times I heard it.<\/li>\n<li>Booker T. And The M.G.&#8217;s &#8211; Jingle Bells. Remember the scene in <cite>The Blues Brothers<\/cite> where they go to collect the keyboardist and rhythm section, and they&#8217;re playing a Holiday Inn as &#8220;Murph and the Magic Tones&#8221;? That&#8217;s what this sounds like. Which isn&#8217;t surprising, as the rhythm section was basically the MG&#8217;s, but it&#8217;s not a glowing recommendation.<\/li>\n<li>The LeeVees &#8211; Nun Gimmel Heh Shin. A breathy, creepy, dreidel song. Whee.<\/li>\n<li>The dB&#8217;s &#8211; Christmas Time. It has a sort of Eighties cheese quality that isn&#8217;t all that bad&#8211; think &#8220;Our House&#8221; by Madness&#8211; but the lyrics are pretty insipid.<\/li>\n<li>Shakin&#8217; Stevens &#8211; Merry Christmas Everyone. Kate listened to about half a verse of this, said &#8220;This is awful,&#8221; and made me skip to the next track. I liked it better than that, but not all that much more.<\/li>\n<li>Twisted Sister &#8211; Deck The Halls. It&#8217;s, well, a straight-up hair metal rendition of &#8220;Deck the Halls.&#8221; Pretty funny the first time you hear it, but it doesn&#8217;t age well.<\/li>\n<li>Sarah McLachlan &#8211; Wintersong. This is pretty much a standard Sarah McLachlan song, that just happens to mention Christmas. Which isn&#8217;t a bad thing.<\/li>\n<li>Billy Pilgrim &#8211; Auld Lang Syne. Country-ish rendition of the song that you&#8217;re thinking of, with jingle bells in the background, and occasional trumpet flourishes.<\/li>\n<li>Gary Hoey &#8211; Silent Night. An instrumental electric guitar version of &#8220;Silent Night.&#8221; Really, that pretty much says it all. You almost don&#8217;t need to listen to it.<\/li>\n<li>Fountains Of Wayne &#8211; Have A Swinging Hanukkah. Useless filler.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I also purchased a handful of songs based on things people said in the comments:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Darlene Love, Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). This works really well because rather than giving some classic song the Phil Spector treatment, they just wrote a good Phil Spector girl-group song that happens to be about Christmas. It&#8217;s been covered by about a billion people, including:<\/li>\n<li>Death Cab for Cutie, Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). Surprisingly, re-inventing this song as a Death Cab for Cutie tune also works. I&#8217;m not sure what that tells us about music, but it&#8217;s a surprisingly good cover.<\/li>\n<li>Eels, Christmas Is Going to the Dogs. I faced a moral dilemma regarding this (which was on somebody&#8217;s iTunes Christmas mix): by buying it, I think I sent a nickel to the people responsible for the live-action Grinch movie. On the other hand, I like the Eels, and it&#8217;s a Christmas song written from the point of view of a dog, which is kind of amusing.<\/li>\n<li>Marvin Gaye, I Want to Come Home for Christmas (1990 Box Set Version). It has that classic Marvin Gaye sound, but the lyrics are some Vietnam-era POW thing, and haven&#8217;t aged well.<\/li>\n<li>Marvin Gaye, Purple Snowflakes. I picked this up because the guys in the AV Club dialogue that kicked this off raved about it, and I just don&#8217;t quite see it. He&#8217;s going for some sort of Latin type effect, and it doesn&#8217;t really work for me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Between these and what I already had, I can at least put together about two hours&#8217; worth of holiday music that doesn&#8217;t make me want to stick an icepick in my ear, which is a Good Thing. I&#8217;ve been hitting the &#8220;next song&#8221; button more and more frequently of late, though, so I think it&#8217;s time to change up the Party Shuffle source, and declare this experiment over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, what are the results of the Christmas Tunes Experiment? I&#8217;ve had a playlist of the songs on the Jefitoblog Holidy Mix Tape (plus a few other things) locked into the iTunes Party Shuffle while I work on the computer at home. At work, I stuck with the usual four-and-five-star playlist in the lab, because,&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/15\/the-christmas-tunes-experiment-1\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Christmas Tunes Experiment: Results<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}