Christmas Music and Grinchery

Now, I don't want to be a Grinch, especially around Christmas time when people actually use the word as a pejorative.  I want people to be able to enjoy what they choose to enjoy and have a good-old time doing so.  Lots of decorations?  Great!  Sparse house with a little tree?  That's good too.  I'm easy.

But while you are enjoying yourself, you ought to have the ability not to have to endure things that are not as pleasant.  And that gets us to today's topic, a little aside into the topic of Christmas music.

Now, there has been Christmas music for hundreds of years, lumped into the broad heading of "carols", even though I don't know if there are some Christmas songs that are properly called "carols" and others that are not.  I don't care, either.  Lexicographical debates are for another time.

What I do actually care about is the execution of the songs, and in some cases I am happy to use that word in its literal, punitive sense.  Just because people know your name doesn't mean that you have the right to abuse music.

This all came to light this year, when the satellite radio company SiriusXM expanded its offering to have no fewer than four holiday-music channel choices -- classical carols, soul, contemporary and traditional.  OK, maybe they had four last year.  Matters not.  It was a great idea.

I have a car with a satellite radio, as most have these days.  We subscribed to SiriusXM years back for our cars, so in our car we have access to the channels they have, including sports, news, weather, traffic and, of course, music.  While driving around in December, we would always tune to the Christmas music channel, sometimes grumbling about the poor fidelity of the arrangements that current "artists" would feel the need to perform.

So it was very comforting to know that we could now drive around and listen to a channel with only "traditional" renderings, meaning that the singers were still singing a variety of Christmas songs, but they were by those singers we could expect to be faithful to the songs' melody and most of the words.  Lots of '50s and '60s artists -- Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Four Freshmen, but also Carpenters and other artists who held the music above themselves in importance.

We are very grateful to SiriusXM for presenting that choice to us.

However ... at home, there are days when rather than TV programming in the background, we simply run music from one of the TV music channels available on our cable service.  You know what we mean; cable services typically provide 50-100 channels of music from a service like "Music Choice", which charges the cable system a fee for carrying their programming.

And in our home, the small local cable service provides one single channel of Christmas music, among the 50 music channels that are provided from the service that they use.  For reference, DirecTV, the nationwide satellite TV company, provides about 85 channels, although in fairness only one of theirs is devoted to Christmas music, too.

So if we want to run Christmas music while decorating the tree, or looking at old pictures, or reading a book, we have that one choice, called "Sounds of the Seasons."  Now that channel does have a goodly share of what we would be happy to listen to -- the '50s and '60s singers respectfully performing classic and familiar Christmas tunes.

Unfortunately, though, mixed in is an unhealthy dose of current performers doing "current" (i.e., melodically-tortured) versions of songs we once knew.  The songs are cycled through, so on successive days you are likely to hear a given recording 2-3 times or so. 

And accordingly, we are subjected to hideous renderings, such as Beyonce's sacrilegious destruction of "Silent Night", or the utterly unlistenable, melody-free, rhythmically-challenged version of "A Little Drummer Boy" done by Wyclef Jean, or anything recorded by Justin Bieber.

Now, I get it -- there are people who say they like that stuff.  I don't know that I necessarily believe that, but I will stipulate it for the record.  What I will say, though, is that few indeed are going to be the people who can tolerate both.  The assumption by the Music Choice people appears to be that the people with actual taste will simply agree to suffer through execrable pop tarts' and rap types' recordings while waiting for the next Sinatra track, while the pop tarts' fans will hide while Bing is singing "Winter Wonderland" -- as it was written.

But few indeed are those listeners who are fans of both.  For the same reason there are 49 other channels, the providers really ought to think seriously about doing what SiriusXM has already done, and provide parallel tracks -- two channels, so that both types of fans can be satisfied 90% of the time, rather than ticked off (good Lord, but that Beyonce "Silent Night" is bad) 50% of the time.

So I'm reaching out, rather than just blogging a complaint.  I have sent a nicely-worded note (and you know I can do that) to Music Choice to propose that they follow the SiriusXM lead and add a second Christmas channel.  If anything happens, I'll let you know.

In a world where music quality is dying, as the performers all seem to elevate themselves above the work of the composer and lyricist rather than respecting them, it is a comfort to us that we could possibly enjoy Christmas music on its own merits, and not because Justin Bieber has to insert 50% note-wandering in place of written melody.  It's not about you, Biebs, it's about the music.  It's your profession, you should know better.

I'll keep you posted.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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