Released last month, Bob Dylan’s 47th studio album, Christmas in the Heart, has something to teach us, or to remind us of. It may seem an unlikely claim – since most Christmas pop music is closer to soul-destroying than festive – but some of it is actually worth seeking out.
The problem is that the stuff worth seeking out constitutes a tiny, tiny fraction of all the songs that make up the genre; discovering it is an arduous task.
There are, to be sure, a small number of good Christmas tunes which you can indulgently enjoy over the festive season – ‘Fairytale of New York’ by The Pogues, for example, or John Lennon’s ‘Merry Xmas (War is Over)’. But beyond these, finding good Christmas songs is not easy.
Of the hundred-plus recorded versions of ‘White Christmas’, for example, at least ninety are essentially indistinguishable from one another – all equally horrible. Any one of them might star on Tesco’s inevitable seasonal compilation CD without you noticing the slightest difference.
It’s unsurprising that this homogenous mass includes attempts by the likes of Westlife, Girls Aloud and Katy Perry. But the miserable list also boasts versions by a host of legends and luminaries: Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley, to name a few.
This is the strange thing, and presumably the reason why there’s so much bad, and so little good, Christmas music: singers and bands, however original, tend to lose their identities when it comes to Christmas.
David Bowie exemplifies this. Finding out he’d done a Christmas song, I was sure it’d be anything but generic and bland. And, sure enough, the first two minutes of his collaboration with Bing Crosby on ‘Little Drummer Boy’ were promising: a bizarre roleplay between the two musicians, amongst the weirdest things Bowie’s put on record. But the music itself is a dead loss. Still worth checking out the absurd video though.
When great artists do retain their identity in Christmas songs, the results can be amazing. Christmas With The Beach Boys is a wonderful album, with a version of ‘White Christmas’ that I’d actually call good. Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’ is a great Christmas song. Sufjan Stevens’ five-disc collection Songs for Christmas is also exceptional. The compilation It’s a Cool, Cool Christmas, released in 2000, features some brilliant tracks – originals as well as covers and adaptations – especially notable among which are ‘Alan Parsons in a Winter Wonderland’ by Grandaddy, ‘Just Like Christmas’ by Low, and The Flaming Lips’ spaced-out take on ‘White Christmas’.
Dylan’s latest album is a bit like these. I mean, it’s not classic Dylan, by any means, and there are some low points on it – his attempts at carols in particular – but at least it’s distinctive, which is more than can be said for most of this music; and so long as you’re not averse to his crumbly old voice, some of the versions are actually good.
