I had this awful idea one day while working at a hotel and hearing the third distinct cover of “Santa Baby” I’d heard during the same shift. What if someone set about to create the worst Christmas playlist on purpose. The Krampusmix.
The idea was to have it be all the worst overplayed Christmas songs, in addition to more obscure awful Christmas songs.
And then I thought “what would happen if you took all the covers of Jingle Bell Rock and played them back to back, salt and pepper diner style, in order of increasing awfulness? What would happen if you did the same for Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Santa Baby, Last Christmas, My Favorite Things, and so on?”
So I started with Jingle Bell Rock. And learned a few things. First of all, I learned that there are a LOT of covers of this shitty song. I learned that a lot of covers replicate Chubby Checker’s “Jingle bell twist” flail at relevance. I learned that the bad falls into categories. There’s a vast swath of covers that I just called “Nissan Commercial” because you could tell that the track was produced with being picked up for a commercial in mind. Offensively inoffensive, even in the context of covers of Jingle Bell Rock. There’s a not insignificant number of covers that are sung phonetically by people who don’t speak English. The number of covers per year keeps increasing as people keep trying to get their cover played in commercials. There is exactly one tolerable version of this song. It was performed by George Strait.
I also learned that youtube is not the platform for something like this. When a playlist contains more than 100 entries, it bogs down horribly.
I then started adding up how long it would take to listen to just all the Jingle Bell Rock covers. It was at least 36 hours. Of nothing but Jingle Bell Rock. Playing this entire playlist at anyone might be a war crime. It was more or less at this point that I abandoned the project because I realized that I would have to listen to this whole damned thing. And possibly keep it updated. As the number of increasingly soulless cash grab covers increases exponentially. And I’d essentially only got halfway through one song.
I also learned of some seriously awful Christmas music. Shit you’ll never hear while working retail. Did you know that the Dallas Cowboys released two Christmas albums in the 80s? Their version of the Twelve Days of Christmas replaces “A Partridge in a Pear Tree” with “A new hat for Coach Landry.” And that’s the high point of both albums.
I once thought that Tiny Tim’s “Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS This Year” was the worst Christmas song of all time. I was wrong and I wasn’t even close.
Because nazis. Fuckers made new lyrics to a number of Christmas carols, replacing existing lyrics referencing the infant King of the Jews with propaganda about Hitler. As far as original songs are concerned, “Exalted Night of the Clear Stars” is banned in Germany and is still sung by neonazis. I hope we’ll never get a worse Christmas song, considering what it took to produce that one.
Man, and here I thought Dominick the Donkey was torturous. You’re out here discovering whole new circles of hell.
Dominick the Donkey is pretty bad, I agree.
I worked in a video arcade when it first came out in the 90s and we had a 1-hour VHS tape on a loop that would play music videos and cartoons which got updated once a month. I worked every single day in December (was not legally paid the overtime I was owed, by the way), so I had to listen to that song over and over again once an hour all day every day for a month. And because there were TVs all over the store, it was also almost impossible to not look at the equally awful music video. If you think retail workers now hate it, they can’t possibly hate it with the passion I hate it with or know the pain of why.
I worked in a small office with an evangelical authoritarian supervisor. For a time we had our music libraries on our computers and we were able to play music in our headphones. One morning we came in to find notes on our desks saying headphones were no longer allowed.
It was definitely December because of what was on that horrible little boombox.
This Christian group called Point of Grace had a Christmas album. I heard it over and over and over and over again.
I would probably go catatonic if I heard a single note from that record.
Mariah Carey was actually a relief when I heard it haha.
Fortunately we got our headphones back. My best friend for 20 years now (dayuuum) came up with an idea.
When the supervisor would leave we’d try to play Bela Lugosi Is Dead by Bauhaus juuuuuust slightly out of sync between our computers until everyone got sick of it and complained. We both threatened to quit unless we were allowed to use headphones when we were told “no more music in the office”.
God that place was miserable.
That sounds awful. I don’t think I could ever work for an Evangelical. Not one who insisted on imposing their idea of morality on their employees, which I assume would be virtually all of them. I knew someone who worked for eHarmony, which was run by Dr. Neil Clarke Warren, an Evangelical. I knew him because we would go to atheist social meetups together when I lived in L.A. He hated it, but at the time, unemployment was pretty high, especially in L.A. So he was stuck there. We lost touch, so I don’t know if he still works there, but I hope he’s found something better.
I’ve had some astoundingly shitty bosses, but at least none of them tried to push their Christian bullshit on me.
I’m in Appalachia. If I worked in an adult bookstore my boss would be an evangelical. Haha
Holy rollers, holy rollers everywhere.
Each and every day of my life someone preaches to me. I just smile and carry on.
Had a really weird 81 year old man in my store yesterday. He said, “I was down ‘are at ‘tuh moose lodge with my girlfriend and some feller flirted with her. My buddy said, “now don’t go fightin’ eem. You don’t wanna git in no trouble.” And I told him I didn’t have to fight him. The lord would take care of him. A few weeks later his cayncer came back. Other night my dead wife was laying in the bed holding our baby that died. She asked me to put a blanket on her. I wanted to talk to her but I guess the lord didn’t want me to speak. Not everybody can see spirits. Only a select few people. I’ve seen spirits all my life.”
Part of me is jealous of these folks. They think they’re gonna live forever and trust that everything will work out. Meanwhile I’m worrying about my health and that everything isn’t going to work out. :p
twitch
The place I worked was too cheap for actually licensing music so just had a radio on. Crappy Christmas songs, plus utterly inane radio DJ banter and 30% advertisements by duration - including ads for our competitor down the street who were far cheaper than us
Trust me, there are plenty of songs as bad or worse. I get the same reaction to several Daft Punk songs. Mariah Carey isn’t especially bad, no matter what the internet says. There are some especially brain dead christmas remixes stores play during the holidays that make my skin crawl.
Truth. I don’t have to deal with this now, but give me Mariah Carey over “affordable woman who claims to sing like Mariah Carey” any day. There are so, so many bad Christmas covers it is ridiculous. I don’t like Mariah Carey more than anyone else, but she is legitimately talented and skilled. There are worse singers and musicians covering the same songs.
“All I waaaaant for Christmaaaas… Is your managerrrrr 🎶”
This version might soothe your ears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RtI5UEZlzU
I prefer this one:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KvWwJ6sh5s
I did not know I needed to see that before today.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=3KvWwJ6sh5s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=2RtI5UEZlzU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
