Yuletide Music Pollution Explosion

People sometimes ask me why I'm not that fond of the "holiday" season anymore, and it's tough to put my finger on it. Maybe it's the disgusting orgy of shopping and commercialism that breaks out on so-called Black Friday, where fat Americans knock over old ladies to get that last piece of Chinese-made, lead contaminated piece of bullshit at Wal-Mart.

Maybe it's the endless jostling over Nativity scenes and whether or not they should be on display in a public square. For Christ's sake (literally), if you had a nice Nativity scene wouldn't you want to put it some other place than on the lawn of some run-down town hall?

But today, as I was consuming my Friday lunch, where I venture out into chain restaurant land, I finally figured out what it is. It's the endless Christmas music pollution that seems to confront you at every turn during the "holiday" season.

It seems like a rite of passage for an artist to, after a few hit albums, finally do your Christmas album or song. I 'd bet you a Type 2 diabetic Santa that you can't name one Grammy-nominated artist in the past fifty years that has turned down this lucrative cash cow. From Clay Aiken to Mariah Carey to NSync to Celine Dion, if you sold more than 100,000 records, you were destined to be in the studio recording some god-awful version of some marginal Christmas tune, or even worse, a whole album.... just so you could shut up the record company suits clamoring to make their fourth quarter numbers.

But the most offensive Christmas song ever has to be the Jackson Five's version of Santa Claus is Coming To Town. If the incessant bleating of these pre-pubescent snotlickers doesn't make you want to gouge out your eardrums with a candycane, then I would argue that you aren't really alive.

From the mind-numbing repetitive chorus (where "Santa Claus is coming to town" is repeated at least 21 times) to the barely ontune pseudo-singing, this little ditty tortures you with a Guantanamo-like intensity. I can almost see Joe Jackson presiding over his own family cell block in Abu Gharib, grabbing his boys' balls and forcing them to reach ever higher registers with their overworked little vocal chords.

The bottom line is this-- if you aren't ready to confess to terrorist acts after hearing only ten seconds of this, then you simply must be deaf: