![]() ![]() 'Tis the season of giving, but you didn't think Arista was gonna throw Patti Smith a promotional bone, did you? Not even to make sure that Britney, Christina, Backstreet Boys and 'N SYNC fans have no interest in midlife punk whatsoever? Naw, it's platinum pusses only at this brat banquet, but at least they're not serving leftovers like Universal. While she's wringing every extra woe out of mistletoe, it's not hard to imagine Mel Tormé up in heaven with a clicker, grinding his teeth at every unnecessary embellishment.Ī performance of "The Christmas Song" is also featured on the enhanced CD-ROM portion of the program, intercutting footage of X-tina recording with vintage home videos of a preschool Christina opening Christmas presents, then cutting back to a grown-up X-tina every time she decides it's vowel-stretching time. If Grandma ever does get run over by a reindeer for real, this is not the person you want making the 911 call. ![]() The thing you marvel at about Christina Aguilera (or "X-tina," as she's also known on this X-mess), is how she takes nearly every one-syllable word in "The Christmas Song" - words like "way," "sleigh," "spy," "fly" and even "the" - and stretches it to eight syllables, sometimes clumping two words together to go as high as 12 or 15 meaningless hiccups. ![]() In Jerry Butler's just-published autobiography, he writes of another soul great, Otis Redding: "The thing you marveled at about Otis was that he could take a two-syllable word like 'longing' and turn it into eight syllables." He might have added that the Big O didn't multiply every two-syllable word by its square root. Regifter: If I had a shrink-wrap machine, I'd regift this to a relative who has no musical taste. Taper: Contains fewer than three tape-worthy songs. Keeper: Contains enough good songs to actually consider keeping. It's got me thinking like a major label - maybe I should make one definitive "Various Artists" Yuletide tape to ensure that I don't have to hear a million versions of "Jingle Bells." Will anything in this year's gleaming stack of holiday offerings make the final cut? Or am I justified in turning in this article two weeks early just so I can trade in these CDs for last-minute shopping money? Use this handy key and you, too, can have a DIY Christmas! Outside of a very few unassailable favorites, the bulk of Christmas records contain one or two classic cuts with a bunch of empty stocking stuffers tossed in as filler. In a year in which pop music was so bad it made me consider being reassigned as a wine critic, the only thing that could be worse than an Eminem Christmas album is another Celine Dion one. This year, the mega-conglomerate has stitched together no fewer than five Christmas compilations for under-the-tree consideration, each covering a different genre except for one - new music.Īnd maybe that's a good thing. And in the magical world of regifters, there's none bigger than Universal Music - the label that swallowed up MCA, A&M, Interscope, Geffen and PolyGram and gave us back "Millennium" collections of every artist it dropped off its roster. Every year the surviving major labels extract a dozen songs from previously released or newly deleted Christmas albums, slap them onto new "Various Artists" compilations and scratch that holiday obligation off the list. TV's Seinfeld may have shone an unflattering light on the notion of "regifting," but that shame doesn't seem to have rubbed off on the music industry. ![]()
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