In the midst of a period of all-time doldrums for the holiday song, 2006 saw two artists zooming in to redeem the format: Sufjan Stevens, who released his idiosyncratically intimate 42-track, five-EP set Songs for Christmas, and The Killers, who released the first of their many widescreen Christmas melodramas with "A Great Big Sled." Brandon Flowers & Co. Still, after a Final Destination-like run of lesser sequels, you may forget how winning the original is - if there was one man in this world meant to rhyme "Carnegie Deli" with "Arthur Fonzarelli," it's Sandler.ġ995: The Flaming Lips, "Christmas at the Zoo"
1 hits on the Hot 100 - more than anyone except The Beatles - it stands as the song Mimi will be remembered for when "All I Want" is as old as "Ode to Joy" is today.Īlso Worth Remembering: Too bad that the only Chanukah song that your X-Mas-decorations-in-October neighbors actually know had to come out the same year as the best Holiday song of the last 30 years, but Adam Sandler's gotta take the L on this one. Is it possible to get sick of it? We're pretty damn determined as a society to find out, but until then, Mariah Carey and Walter Afanasieff's holiday-pop masterwork remains the modern-day pop song that Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole look down from the heavens to acknowledge: "OK, we'll give 'em this one." It's become as inextricable to December as forgetting to wear your scarf, and even in a catalog that includes 18 No. And quick shouts-out to the much-humbler "Christmas Here (Could Never Be Like That)" by Wednesday Week, which gently shames us New Yorkers for taking the spectacle of X-Mas in the Big Apple for granted, and howling Prince B-side "Another Lonely Christmas," an easy No. William Shakespeare would've burned the Globe Theatre to the ground to write a quatrain as good as "Last Christmas, I gave you my heart / The very next day you gave it away / Next year, to save me from tears / I'll give it to someone special," but mid-'80s George Michael probably tossed it off while waiting for the next ski lift.Īlso Worth Remembering: Michael also lent his talents to another of the year's best holiday songs: Band Aid's "Do They Know Its Christmas," an ultra-hyped act of '80s celebrity selflessness that comes off today as an exercise in coke-fueled arrogance and imperial ignorance - but shit, what an outro. Somehow, after three decades of remorseless overplay and unconscionable covers, "Last Christmas" still sparkles like a cartoon snowflake, as immaculate a synth-pop confection as the '80s ever gave us. And by "holiday songs," we're sticking to songs that make specific references to Christmas, Hanukkah or other wintertime holy days - no songs about New Years', no songs just about December, and no songs that just kinda sound festive. Song years were determined by whenever the most famous version of the song was first widely debuted, and covers were avoided in all but the most essential circumstances. To honor (and hopefully illuminate) this history, Billboard is going back through the last half-century of holiday music to choose the one song that reigns supreme in each year.
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The lineage of modern holiday music is full of such strange stockingfellows, adding up to a fascinating timeline that never coheres into an obvious narrative, but is full of enough twists and turns to make it an exhilarating sleigh ride. It seems impossible that Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime," Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'" and Elmo and Patsy's "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" all spawned from the same decade, let alone the same year, but sure enough, there they all are on the 1979 release calendar.
That's what makes it remarkable to go back and find out exactly when all these songs first entered the Christmas canon. Consequently, when you grow up listening to these songs one month out of every year (and rarely a second longer), you start feeling like they all exist on their own plane of space and time, never having originated from any specific moment or place. Every December, radio stations that normally have playlists highly restricted in terms of both era and genre suddenly start juggling pop standards from the '40s with soul songs from the '60s, new-wave songs from the '80s and alt-rock songs from the '00s.
No format of music feels as culturally out of time as holiday music.
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