Tone-deaf tunes

Opinion

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This article was published 07/12/2018 (2465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are a lot of memorable lines in Elf, the heartwarming 2003 Christmas comedy starring Will Ferrell as Buddy the elf.

Consider the moment Buddy turns to his future wife, Jovie, in Gimbels department store and happily chirps: “The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.”

Those words remain true today, although your joyful noise may fall on deaf ears if you insist on warbling the holiday chestnut Baby, It’s Cold Outside, which is getting a chilly response from North American radio stations this season.

Earlier this week, CBC Radio announced it will join two other Canadian broadcasters, Rogers Media and Bell Media, who have pulled the controversial holiday favourite out of their rotations this year.

The musical brouhaha comes as the famed duet, written back in 1944, faces intense scrutiny over what some critics say are wildly inappropriate lyrics in light of the #MeToo movement.

The fracas began last week when Cleveland radio station WDOK-FM announced it stopped playing the song in response to listener feedback. Some listeners took issue with lyrics where a male singer is trying to persuade a woman to stay inside, with exchanges that include, “What’s in this drink?” and “Baby, don’t hold out.”

Debate over Baby, It’s Cold Outside has simmered for years, but it’s far from the only holiday tune that has earned a lump of coal in its stocking, as we see from today’s festive list of Five of the Most Controversial Christmas Songs/Carols of All Time:

5) The holiday hit: Jingle Bells

A tiny taste: “Jingle bells, jingle bells/Jingle all the way/Oh what fun it is to ride/ In a one-horse open sleigh.”

https://youtu.be/sKRk4dURtI0

The festive furor: It turns out this seemingly innocuous Christmas classic might have something of a racist past — at least according to a Canadian professor teaching at Boston University.

Kyna Hamill, a lecturer at the school, faced a severe online backlash in 2017 after she published a research paper outlining the racist past of the beloved holiday chestnut, which, according to the town of Medford, Mass., was written by James Lord Pierpont in a local tavern in 1850.

In a peer-reviewed research paper, Hamill said the song was originally performed in blackface in a minstrel show as One Horse Open Sleigh at Ordway Hall in Boston in September 1857.

“It offers an exemplary case of how a particular narrative became minstrelized onstage thanks to the soaring professional industry of blackface performers and composers beginning around 1846,” she wrote.

She noted the composer “capitalized on minstrel music and entered upon a ‘safe’ ground for satirizing black participation in northern winter activities.”

Hamill told CBC she gave one “benign” interview about her findings to a local news website, but the negative response stunned her. Certain media outlets have characterized Hamill as saying the song itself is racist and should be shunned, which the academic vehemently denies.

“It seems that the work that I’ve been talking about on Jingle Bells… has been absolutely misreported or reported very irresponsibly,” she said. “It’s been pretty stressful because I’ve had a lot of hate mail and harassment because of it. All for Jingle Bells.”

 

4) The holiday hit: Do They Know It’s Christmas?

A tiny taste: “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time/The greatest gift they’ll get this year is life (Oooh)/Where nothing ever grows/No rain or rivers flow/Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?”

The festive furor: You can’t quarrel with the cause — raising money to fight the famine in Ethiopia — but this blockbuster hit written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure certainly raised a lot of hackles back in the day.

Thomas MacDonald of mtlblog.com summed up the anger nicely nicely: “This song is just cringeworthy. Written in 1984 to raise awareness of a famine in Ethiopia, Do They Know It’s Christmas? employs the worst and most tired tropes. Firstly, it refers not to Ethiopia, but the entire continent of ‘Africa’ like it’s some homogeneous blob of despair. The very title of the song also assumes the population is ignorant and needs to be taught or ‘saved.’ Ethiopia has a majority Christian population, so its people are, in fact, familiar with Christmas.”

Any baby boomer worth their salt can hum this tune from memory, because it was an international mega-hit. Recorded on Nov. 25, 1984, it sold a million copies in the U.K. in its first week alone. Worldwide, it sold 11.7 million copies by 1989. It was re-recorded three times, with slightly revised lyrics, but it has long been criticized as patronizing.

“So why does Band Aid 30 feel so patronizing and uncomfortable?” Bim Adewunmi wrote for the Guardian newspaper in 2014, when the song was re-released to raise funds to fight the Ebola crisis in West Africa.

“There exists a paternalistic way of thinking about Africa, likely exacerbated by the original (and the second, and the third) Band Aid singles, in which it must be ‘saved,’ and usually from itself. We say ‘Africa’ in a way that we would never say ‘Europe’ or ‘Asia’… The popular narrative always places those of us in the West in the position of benevolent elders, helping out poor Africans, mouths always needy and yawning, on their constantly blighted continent, and leaves out harder-to-pin-down villains: local corruption, yes, but also global economic policies that do little to pull some countries out of the depths of entrenched poverty.”

And it does snow in Africa sometimes, too.

 

3) The holiday hit: Christmas in Fallujah

A tiny taste: “We came with the crusaders/To save the holy land/It’s Christmas in Fallujah/And no one gives a damn.”

The festive furor: In 1993, pop superstar Billy (the Piano Man) Joel claimed he had nothing left to say and signed off with the song Famous Last Words. Fourteen years later, in 2007, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer returned to the airwaves with an unexpected surprise — the one-off anti-war song Christmas in Fallujah, a blunt and mostly bleak tune about the plight of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Released exclusively through the iTunes Store, it was only the second song with lyrics that Joel had penned since 1993’s River of Dreams album. The singer told CBS News’ Katie Couric the song was inspired by letters he’d received from soldiers overseas.

“I guess just the cumulative effect of this war. We’ve been there longer than World War II. I’ve been getting mail from service people over there, and with the holidays coming on made this thing just pop out,” he told Rolling Stone magazine.

“There seemed to be a similar theme running through the letters, which was a sense of alienation from the home front. I think that a lot of people are starting to feel like they’re forgotten.”

Two key things were missing from the song — Joel’s trademark piano, and his voice.

“When I wrote this song, and I heard a 58 year-old man singing it, in my voice, I said, ‘That doesn’t sound right to me. I think it should be somebody of that age, the age of a soldier or a marine,’” he told CBS News. So he enlisted a fellow Long Islander, 21-year-old unknown Cass Dillon, to sing.

It was a hit with most soldiers, but MentalFloss.com notes “some critics called it an anti-war song and the Pentagon Channel, an armed forces TV network, pulled a segment on the song at the last minute for fear of hurting morale.”

Whined the website stereogum.com in 2007: “So rather than allow the tune to make a mockery of himself (or at least, less of one), Billy enlisted the Long Island unknown Cass Dillon for the militaristic holiday jingle. Thanks to Billy, Cass has gone from an unknown to ‘that guy in that terrible new Billy Joel song.’ Merry Christmas.”

 

2) The holiday hit: O Holy Night

A tiny taste: “O holy night, the stars are brightly shining/It is the night of our dear Saviour’s birth/Long lay the world in sin and error pining/Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.”

The festive furor: What we are talking about here is one of the most beloved, and frequently sung, Christmas carols in history. It may come as a surprise that this simple song, inspired by a request from a clergyman, was once declared “unfit for church services” in France.

In 1847, the parish priest in the French town of Roquemaure asked Placide Cappeau, a poet and the local commissionaire of wines, to write a Christmas poem to celebrate the renovation of the church organ.

“Known more for his poetry than his church attendance, it probably shocked Placide when his parish priest asked the commissionaire to pen a poem for Christmas mass. Using the Gospel of Luke as his guide, Cappeau imagined witnessing the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.

“Moved by his own work, Cappeau decided that his Cantique de Noel was not just a poem, but a song in need of a master musician’s hand. Not musically inclined himself, the poet turned to one of his friends, (the musician) Adolphe Charles Adam, for help,” beliefnet.com notes.

Their song was premièred just three weeks later at a midnight mass on Christmas Eve in 1847 and quickly became a hit, working its way into Catholic Christmas services. That was soon to change.

“But when Placide Cappeau walked away from the church and became a part of the socialist movement, and church leaders discovered that Adolphe Adam was a Jew, the song — which had quickly grown to be one of the most beloved Christmas songs in France — was suddenly and uniformly denounced by the church. The heads of the French Catholic Church of the time deemed Cantique de Noel as unfit for church services because of its lack of musical taste and ‘total absence of the spirit of religion.’”

Despite the edict, the people of France continued to sing the carol, and in the mid-1850s, the reclusive writer John Sullivan Dwight brought it to North America, where it has become a classic, belted out by everyone from Nat King Cole to Josh Groban.

 

1) The holiday hit: White Christmas

A tiny taste: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones I used to know/Where the treetops glisten and children listen/To hear sleigh bells in the snow.”

The festive furor: Nothing gets us in the spirit of the season faster than listening to Bing Crosby croon White Christmas, the beloved holiday tune written by legendary composer Irving Berlin in 1942. Bing’s version went on to become the world’s bestselling single.

Naturally, almost every singer in history has felt compelled to release their own version, as Elvis Presley did when he included a rocking rendition on his 1957 Christmas album. Elvis and his swivelling pelvis had already raised the eyebrows of decency and obscenity groups throughout America, and, as the story goes, Irving Berlin hated Elvis’s version of White Christmas with a passion, branding it a “profane parody of his cherished yuletide standard.”

According to some biographies, Berlin ordered his staff in New York to telephone radio stations across the U.S., demanding they refuse to play the song. Most reportedly ignored Berlin’s request, much to the delight of listeners, who helped the album soar to No. 1 on the Billboard charts.

In Portland, Ore., however, one DJ was famously given the boot for defying his station’s embargo on the Elvis album. DJ Al Priddy of KEX Radio was reportedly fired for “intentional disregard for policy” after playing White Christmas, but some have speculated it was all part of a publicity stunt.

While some had a hate-on for the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s version of the Berlin chestnut, his first holiday album went on to become the bestselling Christmas album in the U.S. and one of the bestselling albums of all time.

Even if Berlin was all shook up, Elvis fans sent him a simple message — Don’t be cruel! Especially not at Christmas.

 

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca