Christmas Countdown Day 10: The Gift that Keeps Giving.

In lieu of actual commentary I'm just going give you guys this early Christmas present I found last night. Brand new SFA single and it's a Christmas video even though not really a Christmas song. Enjoy.

Christmas Countdown Day 9: Christmas Songs as Sung by Animals

I decided to lump a few songs into one post today. One of the recurring things I’ve been told about my countdown is that I’ve been picking primarily obscure Christmas songs that people hadn’t really heard before. I’ve been picking on the new Christmas songs and have been shying away from the classics.

Well, the time to knock a few classics down has come. Granted, I’m not actually going to be picking on the songs themselves, the following songs, in their original format are great and have stood the test of time for a reason. What makes them the target today is the fact that these renditions are performed by animals.

This horribly annoying fad started waaay back in 1955 when a Dutchman by the name of Carl Weismann was recording some birds (as he was known to do back in those days) but always had the problem of dog barks in the background. He became very good at clipping the dog barks from the recording but was ultimately left with several lengths of tape of dogs barking. He thought it’d be funny to re-cut the tape so that it sounded like the dogs were barking Jingle Bells and put musical accompaniment behind it. The records sold like hot cakes if hot cakes sold 500,000 on their first printing. This recording re-surfaced in the ‘70s and became a Christmas tradition to this day.

Fair enough, a guy was stuck with some crap he didn’t want and decided to make something out of it. Good for him. And I even get the novelty of the Singing Dogs, it was cute the first couple of times I heard it when I was 5.

In the ‘90s a cockmonkey named Lookime Imadumbfuck (I think he was from Iceland) thought it’d be cool to have cats do a whole album of Christmas tunes and thus Jingle Cats was formed. They had two hit Christmas CDs, Meowy Christmas and Here Comes Santa Claws which were followed by a CD of popular standards as Home On The Range, Give My Regards to Broadway and Dueling Banjos.

Dueling Fuck Banjos!

Mr. Imadumbfuck also thought he’d rip off the very thing that started this whole fad and have his band of puppies called, creatively enough, Jingle Dogs.

A few years went by and eventually we were given a few more novelty Christmas albums. Christmas Classics as Performed by Power Tools (which, in all honesty, has kind of a Stomp quality to it and is kinda cool.), Christmas Classics Renamed to Sound Funny and then Performed By Farts, (The CD really blows, but the song title Silent but Deadly Night is, admittedly rather clever) and the piece of resistance, Merry Clucking Christmas which isn’t so much a CD of Caroling Chickens as it is a Christmas Classics as Sung by Some Guy Pretending to be a Chicken.

The fuck!? If I knew all I had to do to have a hit Christmas CD was cluck like a chicken in front of instrumental versions of holiday classics I’d have made my first million years ago!

Christmas Countdown 8: Christmassacre

Peanut Butter and Chocolate. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Some things were simply meant to be together, their union making all right with the world. And then there's this mix of Christmas and Hate Rock, which undoes everything that Peanut Butter and Chocolate worked so hard to create. One of the main offendees is Christmassacre by From First to Last

The thing that disappoints me about this song is that I always thought it'd be the perfect title for a Dethklok Christmas parody song. Now if that happens the whole thing would feel somewhat lessened by this crap. You know they're going to do a Christmas single, and that it will be the most brutal Christmas single of all time.

There are many things fundamentally wrong with this song. The chorus has two charges.

The first charge is for listeners not to forget their Christmas cheer because Santa's gonna die this year. Santa's going to die by the hands of From First to Last and there's really nothing you can do about it. Fair enough. You can't have a brutal Christmas song without threatening the life of Santa or the Baby Jesus at least once.

But then the second half of the Chorus, word for word, is:

"Pete Wentz plays in Fall Out Boy
Here's his number, girls and boys:
847-40-0-48, 1 and 4."

Maybe this is so you can thank him for all his work with the Invisible Children foundation and his support of the Displace Me program.

But this is a Christmas song... where the message is clear. Call the guy from Fall Out Boy. Just call him. He'll be happy to hear from you this season, your call will really brighten his day.... and also kill Santa.

Christmas Countdown 7: Cashing in on Christmas

I'm going to take a break from making fun of Christmas songs that I despise and take on a song that I actually enjoy and only recently discovered existed.

Some of you may be familiar with the fake Glam Rock band Bad News. The best way to describe Bad News, for those of you who have never heard of them is that it's Spinal Tap featuring the cast of the Young Ones. Honestly, Spinal Tap is better, but Bad News certainly has their qualities.

Anyway, last night I was cleaning up my hard drive when I found that I had put my copy of the Bad News album on there and that I still hadn't really listened to it. It has some classic songs like "Masturbike" and a hilariously awful cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody" but the thing that caught my attention was a song called "Cashing in on Christmas"

It's brilliant and actually describes what I think is so wrong about so many of the new Christmas songs. I'll pull a couple lyrical excerpts for you:

"This is our Christmas single
Please make it number 1
And give us all your money
To make our Christmas fun"

"Please give as generously as you can to Bad News this Christmas, because, remember,
There are people in the world who are much better at spending your money than you are,
And that's us. Ha ha, merry Christmas!"

"Sorry I can't be with you this Christmas
But I'm in the Carribean with all your money
Having a good drink and a laugh
Have a nice one, merry Christmas"

Musically the song is crap, but I think that's part of the idea of Bad News. Spinal Tap was a story of a fake Glam band who was actually pretty good, Bad News is just awful and everyone knows it. Lyrically, this song makes me want to sit down and watch as many episodes of Young Ones, Bottom, Filthy Rich and Catflap and Dangerous Brothers as I can find. (With a smattering of New Statesman for good measure).

Cheers!

Christmas Countdown Day 6: Funky Funky Christmas

Ahh, 1989. What a eventful year. The Berlin wall began to crumble at the hands of a long oppressed people. An earthquake measuring a 7.1 on the Richter scale hits the San Fransisco area right before Game 3 of the World Series becoming the first major Earthquake ever to be recorded on live TV. It was in 1989 that a lone Chinese student stood against a swarm of tanks, inspiring an entire world to stand for what they believe in.

This year also marks the release of the New Kids on the Block Christmas album, "Merry Merry Christmas" featuring covers of classic Christmas standards including "The Little Drummer Boy," "The Christmas Song," and a cover of "White Christmas" that I believe to be directly responsible for Irving Berlin's death a mere three days after this album was released of a heart attack. I'm not making that up.

It also features some original material including "This One's for the Children," "I Still Believe in Santa Clause" and today's featured tragedy, "Funky, Funky, Xmas"

This song features these would be has-beens (which isn't fair, Donnie did go on to be the cop from the Saw movies) white-rapping about how Santa is bored with Christmas and wants to have a funky Christmas instead. What makes this interesting is that this song is very much the diametric opposite of funky. This is made obvious due to aforementioned fact that this song features the New Kids on the Block rapping about Christmas.

They each get their turn in the spotlight. Jordan K feels Christmas and asks Santa to "kick the ballistics," which I assume is in reference to his plea for peace in the world, no more bombs or missiles or... wait. Never mind it's a clever play on words, he actually wants Santa to kick his brother in the balls. Which he apparently does because he's the only member to not have his own bit in this piece. He's also the only one not to go on to be in the entertainment industry. He now sells real estate.

Joey McIntyre, or as I like to call him, "Stupid McFattypants" (Aren't I clever), has maybe one of the best bits. He spins a yarn of how he came downstairs and saw Santa, who was none to happy with him I can tell you. Apparently Joey had left the fireplace on and as a result Santa scorched his ass. The moral of the story: Turn the fireplace off. >When they performed this song on Arsenio Hall Joey was the one that sucked extra hard (which, I heard, is how he made the super-group in the first place.)

Danny explains to us that while he's in town he's getting down to the Christmas beat and then shows that Snowing, Throwing, Showing and ho-ho-hoing aren't just rhymes but rather FRESH rhymes.

Which must be the case because then Donnie (in his best Mark Mark impression) tells us that it should be impossible to boo this funky dope jam if he's doing it. Which is interesting because I find the fact that any of them are doing this insanely easy to boo, if it weren't for the fact that I never actually say Boo. I usually just point and laugh...

HA! HA! HA! HA!