White Christmas - The Drifters
This is feels like a classic to me, probably because the albums my dad would put on heavy roation each December were things like Soul Christmas and A Christmas Gift to You. It's like the meme about what your favourite generation of pokémon games says about you (spoiler: it says in what year you were about 10 years old).
I have come across a lot of semi-amused anguish from people my age about our once-fashionable culture becoming classic, which is another word for old. ("Aw, I love Arcade Fire, my dad used to play them on family camping trips growing up!") Rather than anguish, I hope to cultivate a sort of curious bemusement as the culture leaves me behind, something like the mood of this almost decade-old review of Nicki Minaj's Beez in the Trap:
I remember hearing this song at the grocery store, piped over the PA. For a second I got a flash of what it must be like when you are on in years, disconnected from pop music, and the kids' newest thing sounds simply incomprehensible, alien. This is music?! "Beez in the Trap" is awesome. It is cool, swinging, ungenerous. But I imagine Roy Orbison at the grocery store, pushing his cart of pickles and Oreos, wondering, What the hell is this?! Any sufficiently advanced pop-music is indistinguishable from noise. One day the songs on the radio will no longer make any sense.
(The review is from Said the Gramophone, a mp3 blog that I used to follow religiously, and the fact that I had a favourite mp3 blog as a teenager already locates me in a pretty narrow window of time and taste.)
Although pop music no longer really panders to my tastes, I feel like I'm in my prime of being pandered to by books. I read and adored Gideon the Ninth this year, a 2019 debut novel from a writer who clearly inhaled a lot of formative livejournal fanfiction and now haunts the same parts of the internet that I do. I wonder if there are other kinds of art with an even longer lag time before the creators usually break through? Maybe in my forties or fifties I will start to feel as if the popular architecture is catered to my tastes (if so: I demand more solarpunk / plant-filled biomimesis / endless geometries, please).
But even if it doesn't, a lovely thing about a lot of art is that we can keep enjoying it long after it's passed out of fashion. There aren't so many people putting out doo-wop renditions of Christmas songs these days, but that's okay! As if they could top The Drifters, anyhow.
Just like the ones I used to know,
- Tessa