For those not keen on the fa-la-la-la school of Christmas music, a slew of albums this holiday season offers every conceivable take on Yuletide themes, from rap to reggae and Christ Child’s Lullaby to Santa Was a Black Man.
No longer the exclusive domain of the cashmere sweater brigade led by the likes of Bing Crosby and Perry Como or divas such as Barbra Streisand and Mariah Carey, Christmas albums now encompass all known musical genres.
The 2004 offerings include the compilation A Santa Cause: It’s a Punk Rock Christmas, Barenaked for the Holidays by Canadian goofball band Barenaked Ladies, and Gift Rap … A Hip-Hop Christmas, featuring various artists.
For the record companies, the Christmas market offers a short sales window with the possibility of a long-term payoff.
”If you have a Christmas album that connects, then it can be one of those titles that sells year after year,” said Geoff Mayfield, the director of charts at Billboard magazine.
Given the huge number of Christmas albums, there is a surprising lack of original material, with even alternative bands generally preferring the well-worn route of putting fresh clothes on traditional favourites.
”The thing that’s really tricky is to plant a new Christmas song that becomes a perennial,” Mayfield said.
”A lot of attempts get made, but making that stick and become part of the vernacular is a huge task.”
Modern perennials are few and far between, with John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War Is Over) and Wham!’s Last Christmas among the select handful that have transcended chart success to achieve department-store muzak immortality.
In the United States, there is also the novelty hit Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, which has become an annual holiday bestseller since its release in 1979.
A cautionary tale of the perils of drinking too much egg nog, the song was sung by Elmo Shropshire, a veterinarian and part-time lounge singer who also recorded the less successful You Done Sprayed the Love Bug With DDT.
A third alternative to rehashing old standards and gambling on an original composition is to trawl through the back pages of the Christmas songbook for an obscure ditty that could be ripe for re-release.
That was the path taken this year by schlock film director John Waters with his album A John Waters Christmas, the cover of which shows the creator of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray sitting in an easy chair watching his Christmas tree go up in flames.
”I wanted to have [songs] that you mostly hadn’t heard, or ones that were amazing because they even existed,” Waters told the Hollywood Reporter.
His compilation choice includes Santa Claus Is a Black Man by Akim and the Teddy Van Production Company, as well as the expletive-laced Here Comes Fatty Claus, by Rudolph and the Gang.
”It’s a romantic record,” Waters insisted. ”If it’s successful, then I want to do Breaking Up with John Waters.”
Competing in the off-taste category is Hung for the Holidays, an album of standards by William Hung, a now famous reject from the talent show American Idol who managed to trade his total inability to sing in tune into a musical career.
The 10-track album sees Hung gleefully butchering numbers such as Winter Wonderland and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Away from the festive margins, another American Idol product, Clay Aiken, showed how lucrative the holiday market can be when his album Merry Christmas with Love recently debuted at number four on the Billboard chart.
Aiken’s first week sales of 270 000 copies were strong by any standards, but he is a long way from joining the exalted ranks of Bing, Frank and Perry in the evergreen Christmas-song pantheon.
”One of the reasons the Christmas category endures is that you get exposed to it from your earliest days,” said Mayfield.
”That music, that maybe in another context would sound corny, might actually warm the cockles of your heart.
”There are still generations coming up who learn to appreciate Nat King Cole doing The Christmas Song. That will never be old,” he said. ”It’s been repackaged six ways to Sunday and it will never be old.” — Sapa-AFP