Eytan Mirsky, Zoenda McIntosh, and Matt Brown are The Decemberishes, a you-don’t-know-them small potatoes self publishing rock/pop group from L.A. But they’ve broadened our calendar with “December Birthday Song,” pointing out how pretty much any day of that month is overshadowed by green and red. You’re lucky if you get a text on YOUR day.
Month: February 2020
Born this Day, eight
‘Another Fucking Christmas Play: A Fucking Musical’ gets not so much mean or real as real mean about the holidays. “Another Bastard is Born” is not about JC, but some low rent unplanned family and the misery of overpopulation, again. Churchy flavored, so somber as hell.
Born this Day, seven
Put3ska was a popular ska band in The Philippines in the ’90s. An eight-piece band that played ska with Tagalog and English lyrics, they took their name from the Tagalog slang for son of a bitch: putriska. “Birthday Holiday” is one of their hits and suggests that if it’s your birthday it already IS a holiday. So sing that to Jesus why don’t you?
Born this Day, six
The Color Bars self identify as a Brooklyn-based indie pop band with big, melodic hooks, a wry sense of humor, and vaguely psychedelic tendencies. Be the judge listening to the experimental doowop of “Merry Christmas It’s Your Birthday,” the ballad of an agnostic Xmas-hater who has found new reason to rejoice.
Born this Day, five
Jim Beloff is the entrepreneur of Flea Market Music a movement to put a ukulele in every pot by Christmas. His own music, in the case of “When You’re Born on Christmas Day,” is a smash-up of folk, blues, pop, and something that always feels Hawaiian to me. Nice noodling on the little box, but also nice imagining about the other holiday-birthday coincidences. Just celebrate, mate!
Born this Day, four
Londoneers of the ’90s fought the old punk scene with mindless dance pop. Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley, and Pete Wiggs got together as Saint Etienne yet featured roatating lead singers like some kind of pop up rave scene. “I was Born on Christmas Day” from ’93 features Tim Burgess (frontman for alt-rockers The Charlatans). And you CAN dance to it. You must.
Born this Day, three
The Tuscon soul jazz collective The Regulars Band bebop the pop for “Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas.” This seems to just mash up the two observances into a party, and that’s okay, too. What’s not okay is the endless skit that bookends their music video (altho the performance hijinx is fun violence).
Born this Day, two
Out of the 1990s Santa Barbara college rock circuit hales Munkafust with their post-punk pissiness. The title “My Birthday’s Near Christmas (And It Sucks!)” is all the lead in you need to feel prepared for this synth-banger.
Born this Day, one
The whole cause célèbre for Xmas is the birthday. Apart from three wise men, no one much noticed the day Mr. Christ was born. But celebrating that calendrical point becomes more and more special as the millennia turn.
And yet… don’t other people have the same birthday? Is that a thing?
(Not much of a one as it turns out, few songs make this case. And according to a senior lecturer at Boston University 1/3 less babies are born right on 12/25 than say on a day in the middle of September–in the USA.)
The big number here (“My Birthday Comes on Christmas”) was made famous by Spike Jones and his City Slickers. As is usual, it was a cover of someone else the year before. Dallas Frazier and Joe “Fingers” Carr perform a schtick-y low rent version complaining about only ‘getting half of what I oughter.’ Trout Fishing in America gets home-styled folksy for 2015 in theirs. Adam Brand swills sweet country tea in his 2018 entry. Overblown orchestral production arrives fully formed from the cracked redhead of Lindley Armstrong Jones 1956 (vocals by George Rock, the ‘Gettin’ Nuttin’ for Christmas’ guy).