Archives for November 2015

This song has held up about as well as a Hip-Hop party jam from the second half of the Nineties can really be expected to. Granted, the lyrics are all ridiculous and vaguely perverted nonsense, and the spectacle of grown men forcefully ‘making that choo choo sound’, as the song puts it, isn’t any easier to take seriously here than it is in a production of Starlight Express, but it has one of the classic Hip-Hop beats of the Nineties, and that hook speaks for itself…for better or for worse, it’s one of the most memorable musical motifs of the decade, and it’s worth remembering that it was originally composed by Barry White himself. Frankly, the hook heard on its own works better than the entire song (as does Barry White’s original theme for the movie Together, Brothers, from which this song was sampled), and it isn’t remotely the equal of the other big hit from the Space Jam soundtrack, R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly”, but given the quality of most of the Nineties ‘Jock Jam’ genre, this really does stand out in excellence compared to almost any other example. It’s far more Pop than legitimate Rap, true, but compare it to pretty much any Nu-Crunk/Vine Rap party song to hit in the charts in the last year or so, and I think you’ll agree that we wish we had party music this good nowadays.

Verdict: Good enough, anyway.

This song is a special case…it’s the only Christmas hymn that routinely gets included on non-Christmas albums, to the point where Barbra Streisand’s A Happening In Central Park live album, which was recorded in June, contains a rendition of it. This is particular impressive given how massively overexposed all the famous Christmas songs are…it’s basically people saying “Not only didn’t we get sick of this song at Christmas, we’re so not sick of it we’re going to trot it out in Midsummer”. It’s hard to say why this song has such special status, but it might be because it offers such a great opportunity to the performer. When warbled out by a generic band of carolers, it’s actually not nearly as effective a showcase for that kind of singing as “Oh Holy Night” or “Angels We Have Heard On High”, but give it to a talented solo singer or an extremely well-trained choir who can really create a mood of hushed peace, and you’ve got magic on your hands.

Verdict: Good.

Like all famous Christmas music, this song has been overexposed to a ridiculous degree, but it’s actually one of the better Christmas hymns, although much of that is due to its obviously borrowed music. True, it co-opts a tune that had been famous for centuries, but it’s actually a significant improvement on any vocal version of “Greensleeves” itself. There’s a reason that tune is usually heard in instrumental versions…as indelible as the melody is, the lyrics have definitely not aged well. Not only are they embarrassingly maudlin and banal by modern standards, but they project a mindset that is rather poorly thought of today…essentially, “I was nice to you, therefore you should be obligated to”…well, the singer uses the words ‘love me’, but I think we all known what he means. Granted, the lyrics to “What Child Is This” are basically pastiches of Bible verse, but they’re a pretty convincing imitation of the style, and it has a very dramatic, almost apocalyptic quality that gives it a refreshing element of darkness for a Christmas song.

Verdict: Good

This song gets slightly more hate than it deserves, at least in the context of its era and genre, but the fact that it’s still completely without merit of any kind makes it hard to bemoan its mildly unfair status as a focal point for rage with any sincerity. Certainly, there is no shortage of legitimate reasons to hate this song: Peter Cetera, who was the band’s frontman at that point in their career, had one of the most irritating falsettos in the history of Pop, right up there with early Justin Bieber and post-Autotune Adam Levine, and he insisted on histrionic showboating in the vein of Michael Bolton on most of their songs, including this one. The lyrics are vapid, trite cliches that sound like they were taken directly from a Hallmark card, and the music itself has the prepackaged staleness associated with honest-to-God Muzak…you could honestly imagine hearing this while waiting on hold when phoning a Doctor’s office or a tech support line. The only reason this song is just a bit overhated is that Soft Rock was in a very dark place in the Eighties, and this actually looks like a masterpiece compared to “Hello” or “Party All the Time” or “All Out of Love”, to name just a few examples. And the truth is, Chicago cranked songs exactly like this out like an assembly line throughout the decade, and many of them were considerably worse than this, but because this was their biggest hit, it’s the one that became the by-word for bad manufactured Soft Rock for long after it was relevant as anything other than a punchline.

Verdict: It gets a little worse than it deserves, but only in comparative terms. Bad.

Judy Garland wanted this song cut from Meet Me In St. Louis, on the grounds that it was too ‘lugubrious’, a position that I don’t really agree with, given that it proceeded to become an immortal holiday classic; that said, she also contributed to several songwriting changes that did genuinely improve the song, and, of course, contributed its definitive rendition. The melody strikes a perfect note of bittersweetness, but the original lyrics were plot-specific and much more overt in their depressing content than the current ones. The version heard today is mournfully optimistic, and you have to pay fairly close attention to realize just how depressing the sentiments being expressed really are. This sets it apart from both the holiday standards of its time, which tended to be idyllic and joyful, and from most of the later downbeat Holiday-themed standards like “Blue Christmas” that generally display their sadder elements much more openly. In fact, in all the length and breadth of the Christmas music genre, there’s really no other song like it, which is something to treasure in what is otherwise one of the most generic fields of music in existence.

Verdict: One of the few ubiquitous Christmas standards that I will unreservedly stick up for.

This band carries a certain stigma just for being both popular Soft Rock hitmakers and a major part of the Corporate Rock movement in the Seventies, but none of the scorn they receive is really justified by their actual music. For one thing, they’re pretty gutsy for Soft Rock, about on the same level of intensity as Phil Collins-era Genesis; for another, they were extremely strong songwriters. Their other two signature hits, the driving “Hold the Line” and the snappy “Rosanna”, are both fine songs, but this has to be one of the greatest Soft Rock songs of all time. It’s breathtakingly rhapsodic, full of memorable melody from introductory vamp to verse to chorus, and displays an elegant perfection of construction that neither of Toto’s other big hits even approach.

Verdict: Good.