Category: pop music

Merry Criminals! an inauspicious introduction

The holidays leave us more susceptible to criminal mischief than any other time of the year. You’re not home: breaking and entering. Your car is in the far corner of the mall parking lot: theft. Heightened emotions: assault. Resultant overdrinking: battery. Family: murder. (Okay, New Year’s Eve is hella worse.)

This is gonna get bleak.

C.G.B. raps the sorry story of sadistic elf managers, Krampus, and dope/gun-running in “Criminal Christmas.” BLUE ALERT to be sure.

Odd experimental mellifluousness, “Christmas Crime” by Philippe Tasquin (feat. Pierre Vervloesem, Didier Fontaine) mashes up coffeehouse lyricism with burlesque house ’70s symphonic rock to suggest an unreality of lawless holiday. (WTF?)

Tuxedo Bandido lightens the mayhem with organized crime, intimidation, and a little drug dealing in “It’s Christmas Crime.” Here it’s Santa on the lam with pop doo wop (not the lamb of God with manger poo).

Xmas Tech Support: clickbait

We’ll end with a ‘Watch the Skies!’ warning. The over-promise and under-deliver of some websites produces a fraud, whether to tally more views or to hyper-link to profit-making garbage doesn’t matter. Clickbait is an evil that reduces value to all adjoining properties. To learn more click here.

Ryland Adams goes for short and sweet with the rock pop in “A Clickbait Christmas.” This is peppy, fluffy fun–i smell a Hallmark movie opportunity!

Xmas Tech Support: selfie

The digital self portrait is the fodder of social media today, but did you know the Japanese perfect the art of ‘kawaii (cute) culture, which involves an obsession with beautifying self-representation in photographic forms’? Things that make you go Hmmm.

More elementary school assembly singing with “Elfie Selfie.” Upbeat pop showtune, if you need to annoy someone else.

Instructions included, Twelve 2 Five funk pop the “Christmas Selfie.” Just like with Xmas, it’s all about me me me.

Xmas Tech Support: text BLUE ALERT

Short Message Service was a slow build through the ‘nineties, but became the standard ‘hey’ by the Millennium. (BTW ‘Merry Christmas’ may have been the first text.)

I won’t repeat the dozen of these songs i posted a year ago. Here’s more:

Only casually Christmas, Sam Wineman is fully tech savvy but desperate with “Text Me Back.” Electronic pop meandering.

Parodying ‘Wish You’ Slant 6 & the Jumpstarts drunkrock “Text You a Merry Christmas” leaning into the funny-voice humor. Yeah!

Dragonette clues us in to the etiquette of when/how to say it with “Merry Xmas (Says Your Text Message).” This is sassy diva pop that perks up the ears with sudden profanity. Earned your burn!

Xmas Tech Support: cellphone

I can still remember the first time i knew mobile telephones were all over: the guy in the stall next to me called out ‘How ya doin’ over there?’–but he didn’t want an update from my business….

Another ‘choral product’ from Nathan Howe (and the SATB choir) offers up a plate of glee fun with “I Want to Stare at My Phone with You.” Actually the irony of this ‘Millennial Holiday Song’ nails it.

Ray Wenderlich demonstrates the agony and the ecstasy of the latest Apple purchase with “Baby It’s iPhone Time,” a Xmas parody of cutesy proportions.

Janitor Jules just plain wants an “iPhone for Christmas,” so he’s composed a vaguely country pop plea of alt-proportions.

Xmas Tech Support: steampunk alternative

The Eternal Frontier tossed their stovepipe into the ring a couple years ago with Season’s GEAReetings from The Eternal Frontier, a pop EP album of ka-ching for you and you and you know who you are.

Theremin cues the horror-scifi in “100 Years of Christmas (She Melts Me),” which is more acid trip than Verne/Wells.

“Steampunk Yuletide Ditty” is addressed to ‘steam-friends,’ and then kazoos. Retro rock that verges on metal, and then kazoos.

“Santa’s Making Time” is the time machine antics of Big Red. Soft rock.

Xmas Tech Support: fax

The future was ours in the ’80s with pagers and home videogames and… the telefacsimile. Now, like in Star Trek, messages could be beamed through wires to be recreated onto what seemed like paper for a lucky recipient miles away. Only a dollar five per page at the Kinkos to get that info to your landlord–don’t forget the cover sheet.

Some 1990s school assembly song touted this wild technology with pop dance party disco in “Fax the Facts.” It’s not your father’s letter to Santa!

Xmas Tech Support: computers

Computing devices have been around since the Bible (when was that?!), but the electro-version that has become our beneficent overlord kicks out in the 1930s (thanks, WWII). Most every bit of tech we will concern ourselves with in our little timeline hereafter is some weird descendant of this mechanical thinking apparatus. So let’s sing!

Brian Gari admits “I Want a Computer for Christmas” with retro shu-bop rock naming all the components, cuz it’s funnier that way.

Joe Algeri has a precious folk/pop ode to “Computer Xmas.” I dig the dial-up intro, psychedelic outro, and can’t-turn-off-the-drum-machine interlude. Dynamite stuff.

Xmas Tech Support: atomic aside

Not precisely a means of wishing Merry Christmas, the splitting of the atom still added a chilly air to all humankind. At least o couple of songs celebrate this big bother for the holidays.

Oh, sure, there’s ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic with the 1986 novelty standard “Christmas at Ground Zero.” This jump jazz still holds up the humor standard even after excessive plays.

Perhaps you could try the nihilistic minimal pop of Goop, instead. “Nuclear Xmas” is the Devo-tastic tune that electronically gets us bobbing and clapping to Armageddon. ‘Nuff said.