I've been at home with the flim fam this week, admiring the Christ tree and it's lighty lights. It gets a bit boring here in Lebanonia, what with nobody living around these parts anymore, and no where's really to go. But this house is big and nice and the downstairs is warm.
I realized this holiday season that I don't really have a shine for Christmas music anymore. I was sitting in one of the OSU dorm eating areas working on a project when some of the tunes-in-question came over the radio, and the realization cam to me that I've been hearing the same songs every December my entire life. Sure, these songs may have programmed a Pavlovian Christmas-mood reaction within me, but that doesn't mean I'm not sick of them. I am quite.
What's worse is all these "new" versions of the same old songs. These newer artists have discovered a tried and true way of making more money: Holiday Albums! They require no creative effort, and people are guaranteed to buy them! But I can't imagine who would. Really, who wants to hear Little Drummer Boy sung by Beyonce? Or Usher? Or Timberlake? Or Celine? Or Britney? Or Christina? Or Jahosephat? Or ...Bush? Or random guy on the street who needs a buck so he cut a Christmas record?
I don't. And neither do you.
Sinatra can pull it off. So can Deano and Ray, and maybe the London Symphony Orchestra. But you can only reinterpret these songs so many times before you have to let them go. I was recording my own Christmas-themed songs last weekend, and you know what I did? I wrote my own. I added some heaping bags of Caws-Pobi-craziness. I even started to cover a well known diddy about a baby in a manger, but a third of the way through the song the music stops and begins again with new sounds and words. The only worry I had with these songs is that maybe they are too eccentric, that perhaps Christmas music is a sacred cow that cannot be tipped. But then I figured that it must be tipped, that I create all my music on the basis that there is no such thing as 'too eccentric', and then the only worry I had was whether the songs are wierd enough. As of now my own regards to the songs I'm making are still unsettled. Working within a theme is fun, but it is a limit. Also, I feel that these aren't necessarily the kind of songs I would normally be producing, but the Christmas theme adds a drift towards novelty and sillyness that I didn't bother to correct. In the end I just say - what the hell. Now that Cody's back maybe we can get my dusty music site up and running again, and then you'll all be able to hear what the hell I'm talking about.
Yeah. What was this post about? I can't remember. But here's this:
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