Monday Musical Offering Bah! Humbug! Edition

So it’s mid-December, Hanukkah has been and gone, and the radio is playing a lot of Christmas music.  It gets tiresome.  To explain why, let me try an analogy, which is not meant to be offensive to anyone of any Christian confession, but to illustrate how someone who is decidedly not Christian can feel at this time of year.

Christmas music is a deep catalog of advertising jingles for hair spray.

Music has been associated with religion, pretty much all religion, since the get-go, and for good reason.  If nothing else, it helps you remember words; if well done, music makes the words more appealing; better, words and music can act synergetically to poke at the parts of your brain that generate strong emotional responses.  There’s large chunks of the Jewish liturgy that I remember only with music, and that the music and words together can make me feel the presence of the ineffable.  Music sells religion like nothing else.

If you want to sell anything, whether Jesus or Jeeps, you’re going to want to hire the best tunesmiths, and you are going to want to really make a strong association between your product and the jingle.  And really, in the case of religion, that’s been done.  I can’t think of the words of the Kyrie without thinking of Bach, the Dies Irae without Verdi, and so on.  Similarly, I can’t think of the music of Mozart’s Requiem without thinking of the words, and then thinking, at least on some level, of confutatis maledictis and other bits of Catholic dogma.  Mostly, though, the music is good enough that I can tune out the dogma and focus on the music—it’s good enough to cast shade on the dogma.

Christmas music, though, is more like pop—catchy, sometimes very good, but by no means great or profound.  Which means that it’s harder to ignore the words, and thus harder to ignore the message.  Go ahead, try to think about “I’d like to teach the world to sing...” without having Coke come fizzing up in your head.  I’m not a big fan of Coke, but it’s not irrelevant to me.  I drink it, rarely, and in small amounts, and actually derive some pleasure from it.  And that jingle is a perfect catchy pop song.

What drives me batty about Christmas music is that there are scores and scores of nearly perfect pop song-jingles; they have been played more relentlessly than any advertising jingle ever; and, they are all selling a product that is irrelevant to me and that I kind of don’t even like and think may be doing some harm in how it is used—let’s say, hairspray.

Both for philosophical and historical reasons, I have problems with Christianity (and I really don’t care for the artifice of beehive hairdos, and how historically half of humanity has been taught that it needs to value itself for its appearance).  I find the concept of the Trinity kind of absurd (not to mention the idea of hair glued into weird shapes).  True, it may work and provide meaning for some people (and the right hairdo may be instrumental in finding Mr. Right), not me.  I can’t damn all of Christianity, but in the present the rise of fundamentalism is doing serious social and environmental harm (And aerosols contributed to the hole in the ozone layer, not to mention how spray cans contribute to pollution).

So this is why I am frustrated by the flood of Christmas carols.  By living in this society, these incredibly catchy songs are burned into my brain.  I don’t like their message, but I can’t help but have it playing in my head when I hear them.  They are perfect jingles.  I would really be OK never hearing them ever again.