Music: Your Most Hated Christmas Song, 2016 Edition

[Allaya]

What's yours?
Sunflower

I'm okay with any Christmas song of the sort you would either sing in church or with a church-organizing caroling group. Everything else grates on me something fierce.

Thankfully, the All-Christmas radio station that my local acquaintances who like to have on in the car tends to stick to traditional tunes (or Norwegian-language songs where I can only just follow the melody).

[AsraiDouglas]

I'll also hang this one here: "Silent Night" You'll either love it or want to stave in your years with icepicks.  Up to you.

I'll be hijacking the office speakers to play this.

[Sefiru]

As I have done in years past, I denounce you all as hate-filled Grinches. Christmas music is wonderful and I never tire of it ^_^

Eh, I'm half and half on this. Christmas hymns are wonderful. Songs about the secular aspects of Christmas, not so much.

My personal unfavorite: "All I want for Christmas (is my two front teeth)".

[Sefiru]

"Silent Night"

The heck did I just hear?

Also, how many Cthulhu plushies do you own? Do you have a lead-lined toy chest for them, or what?

[MadZealot]

Also, how many Cthulhu plushies do you own? Do you have a lead-lined toy chest for them, or what?

Just the coffee cup sized one, so far.  Although He also lives as a nifty statuette on the mantel, sandwiched between Anubis and Baby Groot.

I'd like the Xmas 'Thulie but he's a bit pricey.  
 
Also, the lead-lined chest is a maddeningly tempting idea.

[Emma Eldritch]

Just the coffee cup sized one, so far.  Although He also lives as a nifty statuette on the mantel, sandwiched between Anubis and Baby Groot.

I'd like the Xmas 'Thulie but he's a bit pricey.  
 
Also, the lead-lined chest is a maddeningly tempting idea.

 
I have the coffee cup sized one in black! *tentacled high-five*

[MadZealot]

I have the coffee cup sized one in black! *tentacled high-five*

 
I. Must. Have. This.

[Demophon]

+1. Despite liking a fair bit of secular Christmas music that deviates from the 'sweetness and light' mould (think Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Nox Arcana, Midnight Syndicate), King's simply reigns supreme. I have downloaded the last three years of their Nine Lessons and Carols services from YouTube, so I can indulge even offline.

 
Yassss, King's is the best. It makes me miss my Anglicanism, as the music and liturgy in the Roman church is pretty awful. I may have to sneak back to an Anglican parish during the Christmas season.

[Jabberwocky]

Now that USian Turkey Day (and Black Friday) are past, it's probably not too early to post this thread.

It's an old Cauldron tradition (but one that slipped by the wayside - again! - last year) to have a thread for griping about those cheesy, insipid, overplayed Christmas songs that make us want to get a copy on vinyl or CD for the sheer satisfaction of smashing it to bits. This is that thread!

I'll start it off (again) with Bruce Springsteen's take on 'Santa Claus is Coming to Town'. No, Bruce, just NO.

What's yours?

Sunflower

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI02_UJ1C6I[/video]

This song is a crime against humanity.

[ehbowen]

I hate all of them.  I tend to exit a shop rapidly if they are playing Christmas muzak so you won't find me in many stores between now and January.

Top of the loathe list though is Santa Baby (any version), or is it Frosty the Snowman or possibly the execrable "Grandma got run over by a reindeer"?

 
IMO, "Grandma got run over by a reindeer" is actually one of those songs that's so bad that it's good....

[AsraiDouglas]

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI02_UJ1C6I[/video]

This song is a crime against humanity.

 
Uuuugh.  I remember being forced to sing this one year...

I do really love this song though:

It's the kind of thing you can belt out with a bunch of pals while drunk.  Can't say that about most Christmas songs.

[Jabberwocky]

Uuuugh.  I remember being forced to sing this one year...

I do really love this song though:

It's the kind of thing you can belt out with a bunch of pals while drunk.  Can't say that about most Christmas songs.

 
I think Deathsex Bloodbath have come closest to finding the true meaning of Christmas.

(Actually far less NSFW than Deathsex Bloodbath tend to be).

[mandrina]

I think Deathsex Bloodbath have come closest to finding the true meaning of Christmas.

(Actually far less NSFW than Deathsex Bloodbath tend to be).

I am actually ok with any secular or christian music christmas song done only once a day, max.  Traditional religious christmas hymns ar ok more often, just because they tend to be done better.   (and ode to joy makes me smile and think of max gruber, it's not christmas til I see Max Gruber fall off the Nakatomi building, and almost anything that makes me think of alan Rickman makes me smile.)

[ehbowen]

... and Baby It's Cold Outside. The first ..., and the second one is the Christmas date-rape song.

 
It's not that I hate Baby It's Cold Outside...it's just that I'm sick of it. I never heard it at all until really just about eight or ten years ago, but now...at least, on the Christmas stations I have access to, it gets more airplay than Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Silent Night...put together.

[Morag]

I don't mind versions older than about 1960, as I think the song was intended somewhat tongue in cheek - she never says she *wants* to leave, only that she should/people will talk/worry. To my mind, it was originally a song about a woman who very much wants to spend the night with her date but, it being the 40s/50s, can't actually come out and say so, she has to go through all the silly motions of "oh, no, I mustn't! Haha, have you put something in my drink, you naughty boy?" so as to maintain her reputation because after all, it would have been *dangerous* to try and get home in a blizzard, she really had no other choice!

Which, I mean, is certainly not UN-problematic, but I tend to see it as poking fun at the whole "maintain your good-girl image" thing.

That said, obviously "he's talking her into something she doesn't want" is a perfectly valid reading of the song, and I find more recent renditions, recorded when (while shaming women for wanting sex certainly hasn't vanished) it was increasingly socially acceptable for unmarried people to have sex lives, very uncomfortable, however they try to play it as tongue in cheek.

 
Oh, yeah, I have definitely heard versions that don't make my skin crawl and are more playful sounding than sinister, and they're usually the older ones, because yeah, different cultural context. But there have been some other versions of the song I've heard where the singer sounds distinctly uncomfortable with it all and it just gets really creepy, really fast.

I was also talking about this with my husband and he mentioned that a popular 1940s (which is when the song was written) stock joke was "Hey, what's in this drink?" Which would explain why that line is in the song and would have been seen as playful and funny back then, but to those of us who grew up in the 90s/early aughts and don't necessarily have that context just screams "rohypnol." Which made me feel slightly better about the song, even if overall I still don't like it.

(Which is funny, because some of the bits by themselves don't bug me, nor does the idea of a situation where you're going "man I should really go BUT it's cold outside, that's an excuse right", it's just when the song is taken as a whole that it becomes creepy in my mind, likely because of those removed-from-cultural-context things.)