Winamp Wednesday: Closer Together
Christmas starts with an all-time 90s classic.
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Donna Lewis, “I Love You Always Forever”
What are your favorite holiday traditions?
Look, I love The Grinch. His temperament most accurately reflects how I feel in public during the month of December. But The Grinch is a character of diminishing returns. The book? Great! The animated special? Still one of the best parts of Christmas! But now we follow the mean green one as he spits the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch over a shopping trip in Whoville, and I think we have all seen the effect of diminishing returns. The Christmas magic has brought this tale to a very unhappy ending.
But still we toil on having to pretend that the Jim Carrey version is some kind of holiday classic, his Grinch now enshrined by virtue of being twenty-three years old. Of course it has its origins in the 1950s, because most of what we call Christmas does. A Christmas Tradition is anything that happened to a Baby Boomer twice before they went to college. What have we added to the canon in the 21st Century? Love Actually? Elf? So much of the background radiation of December are the songs and movies and television of an earlier time, nearly sixty years of A Charlie Brown Christmas that seems exhausting even if the special itself is quality.
It’s no wonder that one of the internet’s favorite traditions now is dodging “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Last Christmas” all December long. The only universal tradition we can consider is the absence of traditions.
Holidays are about connections, about mass celebration in the history we share. But what do we share with ourselves? What makes us happiest at this time of year? It’s so easy to get depressed at Christmastime as the march of forced cheer steps its way through every street corner and shop and radio station. You can’t go outside without another version of “White Christmas” slapping you in the face. Sometimes you have to ask yourself for answers. You have to create your own Christmas canon.
Donna Lewis’ “I Love You Always Forever” sounds more like Christmas to me than any Jingle Horse or exaltation that war is over (if you want it). The cavernous echo and heartbeat thump pulsed like the streets of New York under a frigid blanket, sweeping me up like the wind through the avenues. This single had an incredible year-long tear on the Billboard 200, prevented from taking the top spot only by the tyrannical reign of The Macarena through the back half of 1996. It was still in the Top Ten when Christmas rolled around, staying relevant in ways even pop music of the mid-nineties had a hard time doing. When a song is that popular it's going to mean all sorts of things to myriad people. It will catch us off guard right where we stand in our lives, all of us sondering through this world to a soundtrack both universal and uniquely our own. At the end we can only rely on our own version of that song, our own time in our lives, that specific Christmas and what we remember of it.
I’m sure that most of 1996 has fallen away in the natural erosion of time. I was all of twelve years old, so it’s possible that everything I’ve forgotten were the schoolyard fights (real and imagined) and injustices perpetrated by authority figures (real and imagined) placed upon someone too young to take over and too old to ignore. What I really remember is dreaming and pop music, and how often the two of those things were intertwined. The most important things in my life after my family and stressing over middle-school homework were New York City radio stations, and as I eased into a new school and a new age and a new life I leaned harder into music as an escape and an anchoring point.
“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and songs of that ilk say Christmas in general. To be honest it makes me feel more like a Grinch. Songs like it speak to a Christmas that is phony and has basically nothing to do with me. Everyone is supposed to celebrate the same Christmas, but Christmas is now nostalgia for something that never happened to me.
But this song? “Head Over Feet” and “Don’t Speak” and “Where Do You Go”? Those speak to a Christmas where anything was possible. In a lot of ways being twelve years old in America is both intensely personal and wonderfully universal, or at least it was when I was twelve. I couldn’t tell you what happened for generations before or after. But here we were, the dreaded Millennials, the ones who are turning forty or on the verge of it, all experiencing our last childhood Christmases or something like it. I guess this moment was our version of anything that happened to a Boomer twice. We are passing into the annals of history whether we like it or not.
But for a moment I was twelve years old and surrounded by pop music that in reality had nothing to do with Christmas but in my reality provided its foundations. Donna Lewis sang about summer winds but all I could imagine was what was around me and what could be as I grew up. Christmas was New York City and the uproar over Tickle Me Elmo and Nintendo 64. Christmas was new friends and endless possibilities. Christmas was one more year of toys even while I listened intently to the radio and watched MTV and built the soundtrack to my life.
These songs say Christmas more than any performative show of holly-jolly or keeping-Christ-back-in-it ever could to me. They’re mine forever even when they belong to the world. If you asked me to name my favorite Christmas song this one would probably be it. Resounding choruses of undying love in this world. What could be more Christmas than that?
All my teenage years had their own Christmas soundtrack, and I see them slowly get more bitter and alienated as I learned more about the world and got my own heartbreak piled on. We’ll see that process over the next few weeks. Until then, we’ll spin Donna Lewis one more time and say we’re gonna love it forever…
Next Time: You know you’ve got potential…