Category: other holiday

Merry Black Friday

BLUE ALERT: PEOPLE ARE SWEARING MAD ABOUT THIS DAY
Black Friday, the special discount day for retailers right after Thanksgiving, is arguably the first day of Christmas, certainly the first day of Xcess. Not everyone wants to celebrate it.
Without music, SGT Report exposes the depressing truth behind our greedy grab economy. Truth Stream Media poetically transposes retro ads with horrifying stampedes of lower middle classers killing each other, in case you weren’t sure that Black Friday was bad.
Asalieri2’s screed against the special day “Happy Black Friday!” runs against the music of ‘Have a Merry Little Christmas’ while ‘tubing disturbing footage of shoving and punching and grabbing. Okay, i will stay home.
Monique Nagel (i think) has recorded “Black Friday Shopping Song” to the tune of ‘We Three Kings.’ I did not see this one coming. It’s mournful and clever.
The Resident has a cute ‘Jingle Bells’ riff with her “The Black Friday Song.” She’s adorably ironic if not outright funny punching us in our capitalist faces (look out, she swears!).
The Holderness Family also abuses ‘Jingle Bells’ for “Better Than Black Friday” which addresses the all-important Amazon Prime Day. FrGdsakes.
The popular  trick here is to make fun of Rebecca Black’s song ‘Friday.’ Alex Kimball gets acoustic piano and parodic with his “Black Friday Song” as well. This is a rehearsal surely. “Black Friday Night Song” by ‘Two Pretty Girls’ looks like a dare, but plays like a shoulda woulda girl band that never happened. Sing to that laptop girls! Jessica Frech tilts into professionalism with her “Black Friday Night Song.” Great production values; good song skills. Ally Hills pulls sweet with her “Black Friday” and triggers my paradeus button. Loves me some note-for-note parody of pop songs bending the Merry way. (Insanely, Kohls stores has a commerical spot with this same idea.)
Original songs get slightly more fun. Paul Howard recites his “Black Friday” (guess you’d call that a capella) telling the heroic story of his shopping prowess, but keeps going and going and going….
Libby Allen does her “Black Friday” as a kids’ song. Its limited musical range and emphatic repetitiveness should make it funnier than it is. But no, not a insta-classic.
Barry Finnerty and Clarita Zarate’s “Black Friday: The Song” sings the blues about consumerism and crowding (footage of the Huns storming!). but their snark undercuts all our Christmas dreams.
Eric Folkerth gets serious for just a moment with “The Martyr of Black Friday” honoring the memory of Jdmytai Damour, the man trampled to death at a New York Walmart in 2008 on Black Friday. Holy crap, he really wants to remind us of God’s message AND sermonize over this.
All emo alt-pop comes Jim Berhle of Skibunnynot singing “Black Friday Theme Song.” He wins me over with his computer progammed melody and punchy vocals.
Brett Newski tries out hard folk rock (“better to burn out than fade away” Brett?) with “Black Friday Totally Sucks.” Judgment during the holiday times just seems so screamingly snide from this dude.
The real deal here is the banjo-tastic folksie “Black Friday No More” recorded at the dining room table by Elizabeth Loring and Larry White. The satire of our ridiculous ways is so much more palatable with bluegrass.
Beth Crowley sings “Black Friday” as a 90 second musical theater tribute. Soulful and meaningful.
Shop? Protest? Cuddly teddy bear Kevin Gisi finally takes the subject seriously! His “The Black Friday Carol” wants you to go out and buy and he does it in such a christmassy style it makes me cry just a little. Like Michael Crawford in ‘Phantom.’
It’s a Christmas miracle bra sale!

Happy Last Important Holiday Before Christmas!

Thanksgiving is not JUST about food. Neither is Christmas. But without that excessive feast neither would be complete.
The process of creating the Christmas dindin sounds so familiar when The Wiggles sing “The Turkey Jumps Right Out of the Pie.” I’m not sure if they are mistaking this guinea fowl for a blackbird, but what’s this about having underdone pot pie for the holidays?
A few carols mention the turkey for the season. Many are misdirects (like Elton John’s “Ho Ho Ho Who’d be a Turkey at Christmas?” which is some loud 1973 party song welcoming Santa).
A curiosity of consideration is “The Man that Slits the Turkeys’ Throats (at Christmas)” by Robin Laing. This catchy Brit folk song gets you to singalong and throw up at the same time.
My favorite big bird roast for 12/25 would have to be “Sidemeat’s Christmas Goose” by Riders in the Sky. These high-pitched cow-posers really tell a story with their funny accents and grunts and groans and pitch perfect harmony.
But let’s get American Urban: The Arrogant Worms’ “Christmas Turkey Blues” mixes hot jazz, Memphis blues, and just a touch of hip hop to bring that poor turkey’s troubles home. Let his wattle wail, brother.

Happy Christmas, Veterans

It’s a National Holiday Today, based on what happened today’s date nearly a century ago.
 
BLUE ALERT–a few of these ditties are angry or at least unconcerned about the occasional profanity.
 
Traditionally we sing “Happy Christmas (War is Over),” but who needs that repetitive blather by some pacifist?
 

Most Christmas songs about soldiers are miserable miss-you affairs like “I’ll Be Brave This Christmas” (Big Daddy Weave) or “Waiting for Christmas” (Melodie Chrittenden Kirkpatrick). Or even angry send-my-baby-home country screaming like Melissa Ethridge’s “Christmas in America.”

More upbeat stuff is performed by military bands, like The United States Air Force Concert Band And Singing Sergeants (i like their “Mr. Santa“).
Sometimes we get messages from the GIs in the shit, like “Christmas in Vietnam” (Johnny and Jon) and “Christmas in Afghanistan” (Rucka Rucka Ali). Pretty non-Jesus stuff.
 
Except i do like one boots on the ground parody from Zack Applewhite taking off “Up On the Rooftop” (no one does that one). From John Yossarian to Gomer Pyle to Quintan McHale, we find a sense of humor ameliorates the madness of wartimes. And that’s what Christmas is sometimes about.

Scary Christmas Part Tricks

Happy Samhain!
Randy Brooks wrote “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” 1979 and has been cashing in ever since. Now, i hope to never to reference that song again, nor any of its dozens of doofus derivations, but the guy has got a song on his Randy Brooks’s Greatest Hit album from ’12 that addresses what i need to have said. Once Halloween is out of the way, nothing will stop the purposeful authorized onslaught of Christmas decoration and musicality.
So please allow this odd folk song “It’s Hallowe’en (A Christmas Song)“with its simple melody and special sacred sarcasm to transport you onto the holiday highway–it’s one way now.

Scary Christmas Part F(layed al)IVE

The absolute scariest Christmas song ever has to be Fred’s “Christmas is Creepy.”
Fred Figglehorn, as grown out of by Lucas Cruikshank, was a helium-voiced six-year-old with deep emotional problems and millions of followers on his Youtube channel, and on Nickleodeon.
He’s as amusing as a screeching contest, but his song deals with the childhood traumas wrought by Christmas TV specials and stories on the overimaginatively young (He’s coming into the house? When I’m asleep?!)
It’s an added bonus that the performer is so upsetting and the song is so familiarly upbeat. I’m creeps totes.

Scary Christmas Part Foreboding

There’s no better Christmas Ghost story than Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Terrifying the stuffing outta your contrarian soul in order to learn ya the lessons of the Baby J!
Boss Martians have a great rocker called “3 Ghosts.” I dance to it (but not a Halloween dance). (It’s currently blocked on Youtube.)
Animaniacs have a Christmas Carol episode with songs. They’re fun, but 10 minutes later i’m starved for music again.
Which i guess means i oughta mention the Mr. Magoo Christmas Carol and its big hit “Alone in the World.” It’s sweetly sad, not ghosty enow.
Superplushybros’s “Christmas Carol Rap” is clever but clumsy and coulda used a bit more jingle in the backbeat.
Chris Blackwood’s musical adaptation includes the song “Link by Link” which is noisy and cutesy at the same unfortunate time.
But my favorite ghost song springing from this source has gotta be “Marley and Marley” from A Muppet Christmas Carol by the inimitable Paul Williams. Love ya, PW!

Scary Christmas Part Treat

The easiest spoof on Christmas carols would be playing off “Do You Hear What I hear” with “Do You Fear What I Fear?”
The Dagon Tabernacle Choir from the album A Very Scary Solstice have Lovecrafted the song with various unprounceably spelled demonghouls.
My Newfoundland favorite, Snook, has developed an odd epic of failed life dreams to this tune. It’s pretty Freudian/scary. His is “Do You Fear What I Hear?” (Not on the ‘tube. Yet.)
So the winner of festivalisophobia is Dave Rudolf. Dave’s a novelty musician from way back, the kind of guy you saw at some show somewhere and couldn’t believe how funny he was. Unless you travel in the 21st Century Vaudeville circuit you may not have heard of him. Check out his website.

Scary Christmas Part Boo

Well, there’s more than one way to horrify Christmas. You know, like a skinned cat hung by the chimney with care.
Horror movies are desperate for new wrinkles (wait, I’m the ghost?) and love to bring down a good thing (youth hostels in faraway countries!), but most often horror Christmas slips and pratfalls into its own eggnog. (‘Silent Night, Bloody Night’ [1974]; ‘Silent Night, Deadly Night’ [1984]; ‘Silent Night, Zombie Night’ [2009].) (‘Krampus’ for 2015: are you going?)
The song business, also, has been trying to get us to drop a yule log in our pants–mostly with an eyeless wink and a jagged grin. “I Found the Brains of Santa Claus” by Jason and the Strap-Tones is a Dr. Demento classic. It’s silly and jolly.
MxPx punks up the place with “Christmas Night of the Zombies” on the must-have A Santa Cause compilation album. It’s over the top and blastastic.
These are Big Deals in the novelty Xmas game, so i gloss over them. Sometime we’ll get morbid and macabre for the Mass with true oddities (some deeply disturbed songs celebrate death over birth for the Advent. …people… am i right?).
 For now let me share a grim, grisly, gruesome, gut-soaked jingle by Jon Lajoie a Canadian rapper known for his funny songs on Youtube. (If you like funny songs, you should subscribe.)

Scary Christmas

It’s Halloween week and–wait, are you sure you don’t want a Xmas song??
All other holidays bow down to The Big Holy Day, sure. Take All Hallowed Evening, the night before Michaelmas (first day of Winter on the Old Calendar). Here kids learn to earn their gifties. Yeah i know, you gotta be good for Kris Kringle to present you with the goods. But on 10/31, you’ve worked on your etiquette at least: asking before receiving. (Threatening some may say; but i maintain it’s social custom to follow these rules, ergo: policy/politeness.)
So let’s scare up some Halloween/Christmas hybrids.
First off, there’s that Time Burton movie which has already done that. Granted. No need to sing those as carolers; as a parent i’ve heard ’em to death. (Although big props to Cas van de Pol for the delightful parody “Who’s This?” to the tune of Game of Thrones. Ho Boo Ho.)
Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett made a splash with “The Monster Mash” back in 1962. It received so much airplay, he produced a Christmas sequel “Monsters’ Holiday” within a few months. (Not to be confused with the very Halloween Hoedown “Monster’s Holiday” by Buck Owens which mixes werewolves and hillbillies and bluegrass.) Lon Chaney has recorded the Pickett piece as well. But don’t follow up on Pickett… his “Monster Swim” and “Werewolf Watusi” did not reach the zeitgeist. (I am partial to his Much Later “Star Drek,” but overall let him rest. He passed ’07.)

State Twelve: West Virginia

FIFTY DAYS OF ‘MERICA-MAS
A state of musical heritage! Now we’ve got some choices! Okay mostly bluegrass…
Chuck Picklesimer is so cool. His rambling country elf routine never wears thin. Remember that bit about the cartoon show host who tells you dumb kids what’s really going on grownup style? (It’s abit older than time… not just Kentucky Fried Movie, you know like the overdone crusty old joke a la The Simpsons.) Chuck’s your guy. His “West Virginia Credit Card” will get its own entry later from me. It’s WV enough in tone and tenor, but it’s just not holidaisical enough.
The Weber Brothers whisper out the haunting “Christmas Time in West Virginia.” The percussive jingling and chiming, the high harmonies, it sounds like angels singing over a snow covered valley.
Brrr, we’ve got to spice up the mix; so we’re finally going cross-culturally to the Festival of Lights.
Scott Simons is another struggler. After he got credit for writing the music theme for his weatherman dad on local tv, he ran around the country minstrel-style finally starting TeamMate with his gay-ex. Maybe you saw him piano-ing on XFactor or America’s Got Talent. He champions rights for all, and he’s funny. Check out one of his favorite topics, growing up Jewish in the Very White West Virginia. I love the nostalgic canned audience responses paired with the intimate small-lounge vibe.