I was going to start off this post by saying I've been trying to feel a bit more positive towards Christmas this year, having not found much to enjoy in it for the last three, but the songs I'm about to post would suggest otherwise. It's good to be on holiday though and to have some time to socialise and spend time with people and it's good to be feeling a little bit more positive about it as an event.
Over at My Top Ten Rol's been wondering whether some Christmas songs should be cancelled. Rol and fellow bloggers dissected A Fairytale Of New York here and then Do They Know It's Christmas? here.
In place of the awful annual succession of Christmas songs you can currently hear being piped out in shops and on TV here are a trio that give a different slant on the festive season.
In 1978 Tom Waits released Blue Valentine, an album which included the song Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis, a first person sketch which revels in the low life street level characters Waits loved and wrote about and which comes with a lyrical twist at the end.
Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis
In 1988 Julian Cope added a fourth song to his Charlotte Anne 12" single, the sparkling pagan psyche- pop of Christmas Mourning.
In 2000, as they prepared for the release of their third album This Is Happening, LCD Soundsystem contributed some songs to a Ben Stiller film, Greenburg. Oh You (Christmas Blues) is a raw and distorted blues song, sounding like the result of a collision between 70s Pink Floyd and James Murphy coming down hard at the end of a very long session.
1 comment:
Nice choices. I'm pretty sure Cope's "Christmas Mourning" was done for a very oddball John Peel session in 1983 or 84, so a few years before being included on the Charlotte Anne 12". Good tune though.
I hope you can one day start to enjoy the time a bit more for what is...a peaceful and restful time where you lose track of the days. When working in Education I used to find that such a tonic. So glad you can see a little positivity about the Christmas period, but remember there are no rules about this stuff Adam, you can only feel what you feel and shouldn't pressure yourselves.
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