At a gas station the other day I heard a version of “Jingle Bells” which left me wondering whether meth is really illegal everywhere, or just everywhere but where they record Christmas music. I recently heard some horrible carol carefully redone to the tune of Ruby Tuesday, followed not half an hour later by something that had the same melody and arrangement as She’s So Heavy.
I finaly get it. I am no longer annoyed by the utter incompetence of the people who record Christmas Music. I am no longer unable to understand why they do this.
They are doing it to fuck with you.
Think about it. Imagine that you really love music, so much that you’re willing to take the hours/pay/consistency deal that performing music for a living offers most people. And that means that, if you’re going to be doing music, you’re going to be singing advertising jingles, and you’re going to be really emoting while you tell people that this sale is only available once a year. Think how frustrating this would be. No one wants to see you being creative. No one cares that you and your friends are recording better music than anything that’s gonna get put out on a major record label this year.
The only thing left is Christmas music. Because people get so burned out on it, there’s a huge demand for new interpretations of existing Christmas songs. Things that will be different enough to markedly reduce the number of retail workers who spend Christmas in the lockup after killing a number of customers, even though everyone knows no jury in the world would convict them.
So, what do you do? You get creative. You pour your frustrated dreams into making something that’s so laughably awful that getting paid for it almost makes up for not being able to do something you’d actually like to do. You steal tunes from songs that everyone in the world except the people who are buying Christmas music will recognize. (Come, now. If they listened to music the rest of the time, would they release the crap we get subjected to?) You try to polish up your Frank Zappa impression, you see how much you can sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks without actually using hardware to do it. And you laugh about how utterly implausible it is that the idiots buying this stuff haven’t caught on.
This is, I think, the only explanation that makes any sense.