Monday, December 24, 2012

The Tolerable Christmas Playlist: David Bowie & Bing Crosby



"Maybe I'm a Grinch, but fuck all non-Bowie Christmas songs." I tweeted something to that effect a little while ago, and have been compiling this list as a way of proving myself wrong. Yes, there is awesome Christmas music out there, but there is still not one song I like better than this one.

The story goes that Bowie was "actively trying to normalize" his career in 1982, and so agreed to appear on Bing's Christmas special. However, he balked at singing "Little Drummer Boy." Personally, I always found it incredibly corny, although like all Christmas songs it has a store of genuine emotion and significance beneath the must and tradition.

So to start, you have Bing Crosby, he of "White Christmas" legend, performing this old holiday chestnut, the sweet sentimental song of the Little Drummer Boy, and then you have Bowie coming in with something more outwardly meaningful, a direct plea for peace in our time, to raise children to care for one another. But it isn't a platitude, it's weighed down with realism: "Years from now, perhaps we'll see."

It isn't just that there's a new wrinkle on this song that makes it so brilliant. It's the combination. It's the fidelity to the past, the tradition that is so perfectly represented in Bing Crosby singing "Little Drummer Boy," and the forward-thinking verse and new generation crystallized in Bowie (at the time a mere 15 years into his career,) coming together to highlight one another, to evoke a timelessness in the message and spirit of Christmas that still sends a chill up my spine to this day.

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