You'd have to be majorly out of the loop to not be aware that Christmas is basically a month away. It's that time of the year when fairy lights begin to pop up in windows and front yards and mall Santa's start making their appearances. It's also time for fucking Christmas compilations to be played in every place with a sound system in the western world.
So let me open with this. Christmas songs are the shittest. The. Absolute. Worst. Music. I'm always surprised to see which saps actually get roped into making Christmas albums. Nat King Cole, Mariah Carey, The Simpsons; there's even a fucking Pokemon Christmas album. And they're all shit. Even the ironic, comdey ones are shit. In fact I'd go so far as to say that anything with the words "Christmas" in the title, be it movie, album or book, is shit with the possible exception of Christmas Lemmings.
So seeing as how I work in a shopping centre I have recently become plagued by stupid Christmas songs playing over the store radio. after a few hours of suffering a fellow employee said " fuck I hate Christmas songs" to which I agreed, but in my mind I sort of said to myself "well duh! Who the fuck doesn't?" Then I reached this realisation in my mind, I didn't know a single human being on the face of the Earth who didn't dread setting foot in stores this time of year for fear of being driven to auditory suicide by "Jingle Bells Rock". This presented me with many questions. Did there exist such a mythical beast that actually liked this garbage? If so, were their numbers significant? Assuming not, why are we exposed to these songs? Do the corporate big wigs in marketing like this music? Do they think it helps move units this time of year? There were so many questions that popped into my head and the weird thing was I couldn't shake the feeling that these songs would be, for the most part, a negative presence in shops.
After several hours of working for the man all troubling thoughts had left the forfront of my brain, but the music kept on playing. Eventually, as the evening wrapped up, I noticed something else disturbing about these songs. Many of these so-called "Christmas Songs" are sexual in nature. Whilst for the most part they seemed mostly harmless, mentioning topics no more frisky than stealing a quick kiss underneath a sprig of mistletoe, there were a few that got into the eggnog and decided to get slutty. There was this one song in particular being seductively and slowly wrung out of the speakers that actually featured lyrics that went, and I kid you not, something almost exactly like "I want you to crawl down my chimney, I want you to fill my stocking up" which doesn't bring to mind Christmas as much as it invokes images of a sexual deviant with Santa rape fantasies. My advice would be to avoid that track at any office christmas parties you might be planning, otherwise you might find the photocopier unusable and office relations becoming awkward.
But really I don't know what I hope to achieve here. I have no power at the best of times but even if you had the charisma and fanbase to bring down Microsoft I don't see how you could possibly prevent the overuse of Christmas songs in the lead up to Christmas. Me trying to stop these songs with the awesome power of my blog would be like trying to stop the tide coming in with the awesome power of parking tickets. I'm not sure why it's so hard though, because I'm pretty sure they are almost universally loathed. But somehow, despite this, the Christmas soundtracks have become an undefeatable force in the shopping world. I don't think I'll ever understand society.
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