No, seriously, baby, it’s really, really cold outside. Really. C’mon, drink this. Go on, it’s fine …

I’m just back from a quick jaunt to North Carolina to visit a client. I now believe the Mason-Dixon Line should now be called the “Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays” line. Conservatives, there’s no overblown and largely imagined War on Christmas there! I feel a tremendous PC burden lifted from me as I have been aggressively wishing any and all a hearty “Merry Christmas” here in religiously diverse (hello Jews!) Newton today.

It is with that that I realized today I hadn’t banged out an entry for Harrison3.com about the holidays Christmas. (Which isn’t surprising since I’ve managed less than ten entries all year.) I had a great idea for a holiday Christmas blog entry … so great that apparently I’ve already written about it. Twice. It’s about …

(Right about now, my voice of self doubt personified would stare me square in the eye and say something like: “I guess it’s because you’re bereft of new ideas and horribly, horribly predictable. You’ll even make some joke about how you’re so predictable, you’d predict I’d say that, and try to chalk it up to some intellectual attempt at meta-humor.”)

Wow, I predicted that one right! Meta- … oh, fuck off, voice of self-doubt personified.

… Christmas music. Back when I used to actually write in this fine blog, I posted two items germane to that topic – last year, I took a look at how Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” is not just the worst Christmas song ever, but could actually be one of the worst songs ever written. In 2007, I wrote about some of my favorite pop Christmas songs.

Crap. There goes that.

Or does it? Screw it, I’m still writing about Christmas music. Here are three intellectually lazy Christmas song superlatives, compiled primarily so I can say, “Hey, I wrote in my blog in consecutive weeks!”

Most Depressing Christmas Song:

“Please, Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas,” words and music by Bill Danoff and Taffy Navert (made most famous by the late John Denver).

A few observations:

• The chorus is the unsettling “Please Daddy, don’t get drunk this Christmas, I don’t want to see my mama cry”; what isn’t said is the likely fear that Daddy is going to either pull a Billy Martin and crash his car into a tree on Christmas, or beat the hell out of Mommy;
• John Denver himself had a well-chronicled drinking problem;
• Someone named “Taffy” co-wrote this song.

Runner Up: “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” words and music by Tommie Connor. The narrator seems surprisingly comfortable with having seen his mother making out with Kris Kringle, and plans to enable his mother’s escapades/whoredom by keeping this secret from Daddy. (I admit that I often get this song confused with the far superior “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy,” written by Buck Owens and Don Rich. Thematically similar, but much, much better. Although, upon reflection, in this particular song, the narrator seems comfortable with Mommy letting a strange man into the home — “he didn’t come down the chimney, so Mama must have let him in” … as if that was a regular occurence. Perhaps I am overthinking this. Also, this is a long parenthetical aside.)

Best Christmas Song Title That’s a Pun on the Title of a White Stripes’ Album:

“Get Behind Me Santa,” words and music by Sufjan Stevens

Runner Up: Pretty sure there isn’t one, unless someone figures out how to make “Icky Thump” sound Christmas-y.

Best “Song That Always Seemed Quaint and Playful to Me But Upon Further Reflection is Surprisingly Offensive”:

“Baby It’s Cold Outside,” words and music by Frank Loesser.

I was listening to this chestnut the other day (as sung by Dean Martin, that lovable alcoholic) when a friend came into my office and said, “Oh, it’s the Christmas date rape song.”

I started to defend the song as a product of its times (like Ricky spanking Lucy – socially-acceptable comedy gold!) but then stepped back and used the InterWebs to check out the lyrics. At its heart, it’s a classic boy-meets-girl-and-tries-to-shame-and/or-roofie-her-into-spending-the-night story …

1. Boy wants girl to stay.
2. Girl demurs, wants to go home, fears what neighbors/family will say (apparently, she lives with around a dozen members of her extended family; it was a simpler time).
3. Boy convinces girl to have another drink, puts music on
4. Girl intimates there may actually be something in the drink (“Say, what’s in this drink?”)
5. Boy threatens girl with worst-case scenarios (“What if you caught pneumonia and died?”) while trying to paint himself as the real victim here (“What’s the sense in hurting my pride” and “Making my life-long sorrow”)
6. Eventually, girl sees the logic of his tremendous argument and stays.

One has to imagine that if the song continued another five minutes or so (Editor’s Note: hmm, perhaps you are revealing too much about your diminished capabilities with that time estimate – why not say 15 minutes … no, wait, two-and-a-half-hours), it would end with boy talking about how he really had to get up early for work, and hey, it stopped snowing, you can probably go now, and that there’s a cab voucher in the front hallway by your coat.

That said, the only way the song could be more uncomfortable is if :

1. There were a lyric about “You should really sniff this rag/this chloroform is making me gag”; or
2. It were mashed up with “Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas” (“Please, Baby, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas, As It’s Cold Outside, And We All Remember What Happened to My Daddy”).

Runner Up: Wow, until someone (are you listening, Sufjan?) writes a touching Christmas song about serial killer/clown/rapist/small businessman/amateur painter John Wayne Gacy, I think this one pretty much has this honor to itself.

Sooner or Later It All Gets Real

My name is Ed, and I am addicted to music.

(You can do the whole “Hi Ed” thing if you happen to think alcoholism is funny. It certainly wasn’t funny for my uncle. But fine. I’ll wait …)

OK, thanks.

I am a voracious consumer of many things (pancake batter in spray form, for example) – but in particular, of music. I have more than 1,100 CDs and around 23,000 songs on an oversized hard drive at home; it’s simply too much to fit on any of Apple’s various iPods, because most of Steve Job’s target market isn’t clinically insane.

My appetite for music (and Cheetos and excessive self-doubt) has defined me since my teens. You know when you ask someone who doesn’t really like music what kind of music they like, and they say, “Oh, I listen to everything?” I truly believed that I was the exception. I really do like everyting.

(Sure, I tend to gravitate toward the jangly, guitar-driven rock of the Beatles, Byrds, R.E.M., Wilco, etc. The common denominator? Catchy, jangly music by white people, for white people.)

But … I do have a lot of jazz and enjoy the Parliament-Funkadelic (I saw P-Funk in 1999 and left after three hours; as far as I know, George Clinton is still on the Roxy stage a decade hence doing another encore) and James Brown. I like some hip-hop (although I admit my frame of reference is pretty much 1986-1991), classic and alt-country … everything except opera and … well, opera.

So a real-world, hardware challenge ultimately forced me into an existential argument — one that questioned most of my suppositions.

With so much music, I really struggle with how to rotate songs onto the limited space on my iPhone. I wanted to make a “Top 20” list of my “go-to” that I would always have handy on the iPhone. The criteria for selection was relatively short: the song had to be awesome, and yes, it had to pass my pretentious “inner-aging-hipster’s limitless desire for acceptance by some vague group of like-minded aging hipsters ‘street cred’ test.” (By the way, no one does that better than Greg Kot and Jim DeRegattis, whom I often daydream are my best friends, over at PRI’s “Sound Opinions” ).)

So after some false starts and an initial Top 20 list that featured 130 songs, I finalized my list.

And it goes a little something like this, hit it!

(Author’s note: that introduction will be the funkiest part of this list)

“Alternative Ulster,” Stiff Little Fingers
“Autumn Sweater,” Yo La Tengo
“Blue Train,” John Coltrane (1)
“Can’t Truss It,” Public Enemy (2)
“A Change Is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke (3)
“Cold Sweat, Pts. 1 & 2,” James Brown (4)
“The Concept,” Teenage Fanclub
“Dancing Queen,” Abba
“Here Comes Your Man,” The Pixies
“Higher Ground,” The Feelies (5)
“In My Life,” The Beatles
“Like a Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan
“My Life Is Right,” Big Star
“Nightshift,” The Commodores (6)
“Pot Kettle Black,” Wilco
“Tangled Up in Blue,” Bob Dylan
“Teenage Kicks,” The Undertones
“To Love Somebody,” Bee Gees
“Train In Vain (Stand By Me),” The Clash
“Turn! Turn! Turn!,” The Byrds
“4th of July,” X

Footnoes:
(1)OK, I admit. I added this song to add some stylistic and well, racial diversity. Ultimately, I had to be true to myself and remove it. When I called myself on it.
(2)Hip-hop!
(3)Sam Cooke was black. Just sayin’.
(4)James Brown, also black.
(5)This is the song that replaced “Blue Train.” The Feelies are, well, white and jangly.
(6)The Commodores were black, though.

I was very proud of my list. Since no one else really cares, I had an internal dialogue with what I thought was my inner hipster but ended up being a more cynical part of my subconscious. I took the liberty of transcribing the conversation (as my subconscious is quite litigious):

Me: “Wow, what a cool list. So eclectic.”
Subconscious: “Eclectic? Seriously?”
Me: “Come on. I like everything. Right?”

(Taking the liberty to personify my subconscious for the purpose of completing this blog entry, its look of mild bemusement led me to believe that it was not buying it.)

So I made an effort to put my 20 into buckets on the spot. Ideally I’d have 20 songs, 20 buckets.

Ultimately, I fell a little short.

Me: “OK, Yo La Tengo. Hmm, jangly alterna-hipster. Teenage Fanclub … OK, well, that’s the same. The Byrds … ok, jangly. X … guitar-driven, hooky, OK, pretty similar. Pixies … hmm, it’s different but the same. Stiff Little Fingers and Undertones are … OK, thematically simlar to everything else but stylistically … slightly different.. OK, wait, Abba is disco! That’s different! So are the Bee Gees!”
Subconscious: “Bee Gees and Abba are in the same bucket.”
Me: “No! This is the pre-disco, chamber-pop Bee Gees of the late 1960’s. Which puts them in the same bucket as The Beatles, well and ultimately Dylan.”
Me: “Also, as you can tell by my carefully-crafted footnotes, Subconscious,  Sam Cooke, James Brown, The Commodores and Public Enemy are black!”
Subconscious: “You’ve been wearing a v-neck sweater backwards for the last two hours.”

Stopping to remove my sweater and turn it around (it did seem awfully revealing on my back), I stepped back for an assessment. My subconscious was calling me out on something I had never had to defend (the music, not the sweater, which was indefensible), mostly because I surrounded myself with like-minded musical hipster wannabes who speciously claimed eclecticism.

My musical house of cards was collapsing and there was nothing I could do to effectively argue my case to myself. I really was my own worst critic.

By the end of the argument I was a quivering mass that ultimately using affirmative action to promote the diversity in my musical tastes. Sam Cooke became the Jackie Robinson of my Top 20. If I had a black woman in there (or, for that matter, any woman), she would be the Rosa Parks (or, um, Geraldine Ferraro?).

So, in the weeks hence, four things have happened:

1. I’ve ultimately accepted that I like vast quantities of ultimately similar-sounding music. And I’m OK with that.
2. That said, I’ve tried to push myself to expand my musical boundaries.
3. I put sticky notes with “front” on my sweaters when they come back from the cleaners.
4. I really hate my subconscious.

I am reminded of a PSA I saw when I was a kid in which a martian who eats only candy bars suddenly tries Earth fruit. He finds it “yummy and not bad,” and exclaims that “by only eating candy bars, I don’t know what I’ve missed.” In this case, the jangle-pop of R.E.M. and the Feelies are the candy bars, and some recent additions to my collection (Lady Gaga, Ethiopian jazz legend Mulatu Astake (admittedly driven by a positive review in Pitchfork) and a Hank William Sr. retrospective) are my Earth fruit.

(Full disclosure: I have listened to Ms. Gaga’s The Fame Monster a lot the last few days. Usually after I finish it, I immediately throw on something like R.E.M.’s Murmur or an old Elvis Costello album just in case the street cred police are nearby. I’m making progress, but very, very slowly).