Someday at Christmas - Lizzo

Lizzo said that she chose to cover this song “not just because it’s a classic, but because it’s a reminder to us that almost 60 years later, we are still fighting for peace, compassion, and equality”. Sometimes 1960s lyrics calling for peace and love feel a bit dated to me, a wish that seems too simple to overlay onto modern geopolitics. But I ought not to deride the wish; I write to you from Paris, where it snowed last night and we are having the opposite of a warm December, and war has people worried that it will get very dark and cold indeed.

Friends in North America have asked me about what the European energy crisis is like; I don’t know to what extent we’re having one, at least in France? People are definitely talking about it, but when I checked the electricity map just now, France was only using gas for 12% of its energy (62% was nuclear). Macron gave a typically testy interview last week where he rebukes public electricity companies, telling them to (pardon my translation):

Do their jobs and provide electricity… not start making people afraid with absurd scenarios like we’ve heard over the past few hours. Stop à tout ça ! We are a big country, with an excellent energy model, and we’ll hold on through the winter despite the war. And so I ask everyone to do their jobs.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Takénobu

I love swift little layers of cello like this; there’s something about the resonance of a bow drawn under gentle sudden notes that gets me immediately bought into an arrangement. This is a new arrangement of quite an old carol. On archive.org you can, delightfully, read a cranky broadside from 1824 about how “in London, excepting some croaking ballad-singer bawling out ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen,’ or a like doggrel, nothing in the shape of Carols is heard”.

Given its age, it’s perhaps not surprising that the lyrics are quite religious. I notice my atheist’s attention settling more on tidings of comfort and joy than satan’s power and might. There are some aspects of faith that I find appealing; when I first read the opening line of Julian Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened Of in a newspaper, I immediately cut it out for a collage: I don’t believe in god, but I miss Him. It seems rather nice to believe in cosmic justice, and an omniscient power enforcing it.

Every Year So Different - Cornershop & TRWBADOR

As usual, a relaxed song for Christmas day. This one reminds me of why I love holiday traditions so much: 

It’s the same every year, but every year’s so different

World of Love - Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

If I had one wish for Christmas this year
There'd be no more sorrow, there'd be no pain or tears,
If it was up to me, darling, I would build you a world of love

If you could rebuild the world, would there be no more sorrow? I think there is far too much pain in the world, but wouldn’t it be a little dull if there were no pain or tears whatsoever?

One of my favourite blogs of 2021 recently put out a post on Why Describing Utopia Goes Badly. The author’s theory is that utopias sound dull, homogeneous and alien. Dull because there isn’t as much room for overcoming challenges and conflict. Homogeneous because many utopias apply a specific lifestyle to everyone in society. Alien because:

Maybe Next Year - Jenny Owen Youngs

A song about missing someone at Christmas. The opening piano chords made me think this would be a real downer, but the mood is more one of wistful melancholy:

easy to let you go most of the time
the ache in my chest has been slipping my mind
see on the screen it’s a wonderful life

THANK YOU MARIAH - Kaleena Zanders

You might expect me to get excited when grocery stores start playing Christmas music over their tinny speakers, but though I am, obviously, something of a Christmas music enthusiast, I find a lot of Christmas music to be cloying and annoying. Many seasonal songs are best avoided if possible.

This absolute bop of a Christmas track is a comedic celebration of being annoyed at inescapable Christmas songs:

Skating on the River - Lily Frost

Do you listen to songs on repeat? Not just once or twice, but for hours? I don’t do this very often, but I did a marathon of Skating on the River in December… 2006, I think? I was nursing a massive crush on a friend and “skating on the river, your hand in mine” seeked a very romantic prospect. It’s possible I did actually hold hands with this person while skating along a scenic path through the woods. You’d think I’d remember one way or another, but she was a much better skater than me (she played hockey, this newsletter is CanCon) and any hand-holding would have been easy to interpret as friendly stabilization rather than flirting.

This is a challenge I’ve often encountered when trying to flirt with girls: how do I indicate romantic interest, short of directly propositioning someone? Friends can cuddle, hold hands, and tell each other they’re beautiful. Some friends even call each other girlfriends. You would think kissing would be unambiguous, but I present as counter-evidence a conversation with one of my first year roommates:

Jingle Bell Rock (Spanish version) - Flor de Toloache

I find most versions of Jingle Bell Rock pretty dull. Sure, the tune gets lodged in my head, but the lyrics are so contentless that it ends up sounding way too much like this unhinged parody. 

The Flor de Toloache version gets points for (code)-switching up the lyrics, which means you get to hear silly  intersentential switching between Spanish and English, like Giddy-up jingle horse, te toca trotar, and learn the extremely delightful verb cascabelear. I don’t think I caught examples of other types of code-switching in the lyrics, but correct me if I’m wrong!

Glittery - Kacey Musgraves (feat. Troye Sivan)

I like how this song describes positive but somewhat confusing romantic feelings. Every single kiss is like a gift to me but also you shake me up and turn me upside down just like a snow globe.

I’ve never felt that skilled at expressing my romantic feelings. I’m often caught tangle-tongued when partners sincerely say sweet things to me. “Thanks, yes, I… also think you are great” feels pretty weak.

Holiday - She & Him

I haven’t been an engineer for more than a year. Instead, I’m doing stuff that I believe is important in theory (encouraging young synthetic biologists to reflect on responsible science) but that, hour-to-hour, involves a lot of sending emails and espousing opinions I feel underqualified to defend.

I volunteered for this nonprofit before starting my job, and I was a really good volunteer! I used to wonder why I seemed to show more agency and dedication in my volunteer gigs than at my engineering job… Was I just kind of a bad employee? A bad engineer? More passionate about responsibility than robots? Now that I’m doing this work full-time, I think it’s more that I wasn’t previously paying The Costs of Reliability:

I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm [Yesking Remix] - Billie Holiday

An extremely toasty dub remix of another seasonal (though not particularly Christmas-related) classic.

I’m generally in the “off with my overcoat” camp; I just don’t seem to get cold very easily. Earlier this week, a friend was telling me that people can earn points with her if they have blankets lying around their living rooms. She thinks “own throw blankets” belongs on lists like Steps Every Girl Can Take to Get a Girl to Sleep Over along with more traditional entries like “stock up on contact solution”. This would not have occurred to me! Are girls often so cold that they would leave a house for lack of a blanket?

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.

It's Lit - Friend of Friend

I can’t seem to track it down, but I remember reading an interview where Grimes said she tried to make the song California as “sonically obnoxious” as possible. I freely admit to enjoying a distastefully peppy pop single on occasion (samples from my “obnoxious” playlist: Pop It, The Magic Position) and It’s Lit fits the genre. It’s kind of stupid, but also very energetic and fun!

I get a specific joy from making kind of stupid things. One of my favourite creative feelings comes when I’m making something so ridiculous that it feels almost illicit. Like, why did no one stop me from being a sexy Long Furby for halloween? Because they couldn’t, hahaha! I was making that costume myself!

The joy of the stupid seems to be what animates the Stupid Shit That No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon, which has featured projects like ​Wienchimes (windchimes made out of hot dogs) and Shakie (a camera app that only takes pictures when the phone is vigorously shaken). I’ve been to a genuinely productive hackathon, but more often watched a confusing parade of students deliver rotely inspiring pitches about the growth potential of a shoddy app they built in a weekend. Why couldn’t we admit to ourselves that we’d just wanted to spend a few sleep-deprived days messing around with technology?

Hard Candy Christmas - Tracey Thorn

I knew this song would end up on this year’s mix after hearing the first two lines, which felt a bit personally targeted:

Hey, maybe I’ll dye my hair
Maybe I’ll move somewhere

I spent Saturday afternoon bleaching my hair in advance of getting a photo taken for a visa application, so. The overall mood of the song is a sort of aimless optionality: maybe I’ll sleep real late, maybe I’ll lose some weight… maybe I’ll settle down, maybe I’ll just leave town. The last time I left a town, it was because I didn’t want to settle down forever in California, and “not forever” has to translate until “not now” or else eventually become untrue.

All I Want for Christmas Is You - Nataly Dawn, Cyrille Aimee

Although you can’t tell from the title, this song is a French translation of the Mariah Carey classic. I went looking for a translation because I’ve been biking around town singing the tune with obviously bad French lyrics (one way I practise languages is by attempting to translate whatever song is stuck in my head). Not all of my lyrics were wrong! I managed « Tout ce que je veux pour Noël, c’est toi », but « n’importe les cadeaux au-dessus du pin » is garbage. In my defense, dessus (above) and dessous (beneath) shouldn’t be such similar words.

One thing I particularly like about this song is that it’s chosen beautifully indirect translations in a few places:

Combien de noël? - Tricot Machine

This song opens with a fragile question: Combien de Noëls aurons-nous encore ensemble?