Hey! Where'd you get such a WEIRD Christmas song?
Yeah, there are some odd ones out there, to be sure, and over the last month or so I asked for your oddest, strangest, most disturbing and downright weird Christmas songs. Now I'm going to talk about them, in
Note: Anything that was suggested but which I don't think is weird or different enough is not getting included, but there's no need for the blown gasket, Charlie, it just didn't fit in, okay?
I was originally going to rank them, but f
uck me, they're all pretty off-the-wall, and who is to say which is weirder? So instead I'm just going to list them in the order they were suggested. Which means we kick off with this:
Seasoned greetings (The Residents) from the debut album “Meet The Residents”, 1974
A weird little instrumental which sounds like they either listened to a lot of Waits, or he to them. Strange instruments with a thick bass backing track and something that sounds like fingers being scraped across a blackboard, psychedelic little noises, sax and horn, but no vocals which makes this really only a Christmas song in name. Oh wait, there they are, right at the end. Meh. Still a bit of a disappointment really. On we go.
Santa Claus has got the AIDS this year (Tiny Tim) 1980
Anyone who knows of Tiny Tim will remember him for the ukulele-accompanied hit “Tiptoe through the tulips”, but that was in 1968, and this was written twelve years later, as the AIDS epidemic began to make itself known and spread across the world. Sources indicate that Tim did not know how serious the disease was, and of course he had no idea how many lives it would claim, so you can perhaps forgive him for his making a joke (and a buck or two) out of it, but even so it does seem incredibly ill-timed and insensitive, given what we know now. Of course, it's easy to be judgemental with hindsight. Fun, too.
The fact that he uses the word “the” in front of AIDS, rather than the single acronym as was very quickly adopted as the disease took a deathgrip on the world is an indication of how little he knew about this curse on mankind. I have to say though, it's not really funny. It's not even a good song. Perhaps in 1980 you could laugh, but here and now it just seems crass in the extreme. Definitely a case of an old washed-up has-been trying to cash in on human misery to make a few dollars. Bah! Humbug! Next!
Fuck Christmas (Tankard) from the album “The Tankard”, 1995
Yeah, this is more like it: a straight-ahead, metal extended finger to the holiday season. Noddy Holder, eat your heart out! Love the line
”Christmas time is here again/ Time to give your cash to them!” Right on guys! The end line is great too: “He was f
ucking born in August anyway!”
