Holiday Staples That Should be Banished from the Airwaves
By Max Brown
Staff Writer
Christmas is widely considered one of the happiest times of the year, with presents, hot cocoa, reindeer, and people wearing terrible sweaters ironically. This holiday brings joy to people all over the world – it stopped World War I for crying out loud.
Unfortunately, nothing can be all good. Every year, we are forced by friends, relatives, and radio to listen to an onslaught of terrible Christmas songs that everyone actually hates, but pretends to like out of “tradition.” Here are the worst offenders.
5. Justin Bieber – “Mistletoe”
Let’s get this mess out of the way first. So much has already been said about this narcissistic, clueless, deluded, wannabe that to add more may seem like a redundancy.
This song sums up just about everything wrong with Bieber and his music. Lyrics that sound like they were written by googling “what words rhyme with ‘x’?,” copious amounts of autotune to cover the Biebs’ diminishing range, and a video with so many teen angst clichés that I’m surprised it wasn’t made in a middle school film class.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to pour bleach on my hard drive because it knows that I googled “Justin Bieber” to find a stock photo for this article.
4. Duck the Halls – “Santa Looked a lot Like Daddy”
This is why other countries will never take American culture seriously. For every Statue of Liberty or Mark Twain, there is an equal and opposite “artwork” that destroys any progress made by the first. I never understood the whole Duck Dynasty obsession. It’s just some family in the Deep South that sells duck calls.
I guess since you can become famous by doing something stupid in public for exactly six seconds and filming it on a low-res cellphone, it’s not a stretch for Duck Dynasty to be a successful show.
The songs itself sounds like a Lynyrd Skynyrd album that was left in a damp box for a few years and then played on a broken turntable. Also included are children’s’ choir parts, because apparently there is no such thing as suffering enough.
3. Gayla Peevey – “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”
I never understood why people record their kids doing things like this. I don’t get what’s supposed to be cute about marketing a little kid who cannot sing in the first place singing something like this. Putting a kid up to this is the same thing as throwing that poor kid who played Anakin in “The Phantom Menace” to the internet wolves.
The song itself is the equivalent of your eight-year-old sister/ cousin’s choir recital that you only attend out of a sense of moral duty, except that you’re expected to pay money for the privilege of enjoying this “song.” Also, why a hippopotamus? Is kids saying big words supposed to be cute or something? Just hippo, or any animal for that matter, would be far catchier.
2. Tiny Tim – “Santa Claus has got the AIDS”
This song is exactly as unfunny and offensive as the title makes it sound. Originally recorded in 1980 at the start of the AIDS crisis, Tiny Tim claims that the title was actually referring to “ayds,” an appetite-suppressing candy bar from the 70s. Whether you believe that the title is an unfortunate accident or a morbid joke using “Freddy Got Fingered”-level humor, this song can’t be ignored on a worst Christmas songs list. Besides, just look at Tiny Tim. Look at him, and let him haunt your nightmares.
3. Paul McCartney – “Wonderful Christmastime”
This song doesn’t include children, bad TV shows, Justin Beaver, or jokes about AIDS, and is somehow worse than all of the songs that do.
From the opening bars, which sound like they were taken from My First Casio Keyboard, I knew that this would be a bad one. The lyrics are so simplistic and inoffensive that I almost expect to hear it in one of those car commercials where some guy buys his wife an expensive car, and she somehow isn’t angry that he spent over ten thousand dollars without consulting her.
It’s disheartening to think that, less than 10 years earlier, this man wrote classics like “Hey Jude” and “Let it Be.” What truly impressed me, though, is that the song once again demonstrates the creative foil of McCartney’s pop sensibilities versus John Lennon’s experimental edge. Where Lennon’s “Revolution 9” is a bizarre hot mess widely considered to be the worst Beatles song, McCartney created the most mundane, corporate, flavorless pop song, and it is widely considered to be the worst Christmas song.
