Traditional Christmas tunes becomig old

Generally, genres of music are so broad and impossibly diverse that it’s absurd to hate a specific one. While country and rap and metal all have a unique sound, there is a multitude of musical artists that stray from that sound all while remaining within the genre. There will always be someone to experiment with the stereotypical sound of a given genre, and more often than not, they can be not only successful in that genre but have their music remembered and cherished by future generations. This is true for pop, hip hop, rock, country, EDM, alternative rock, metal … everything except for Christmas music.

Christmas music doesn’t change. It doesn’t evolve, at least not in any lasting or meaningful way. While the country music played on the radio changes on the daily, the Christmas music we hear is the same Christmas music our parents and grandparents heard.

Every year, the same 10 or so songs bury their talons into our collective brain and rip out all ability to think critically about music. When we hear bad pop music, we can identify it and discuss it and mock it, but when it comes to Christmas music, it’s like we’ve all made some secret pact to never talk about how much it sucks.

We can laugh at and criticize lyrics like, “Girls like you love fun; yeah, me too,” (Maroon 5, “Girls Like You”), but when it comes to Christmas music, which is often lyrically brain dead and more repetitive than a GIF, we don’t even notice.

“White Christmas” is the best-selling single of all time, and it has seven lyrics. It repeats “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” five times and “May all your Christmases be white” more than 10. Those two lyrics alone make up over 50 percent of the song, and neither lyric is particularly well written or interesting.

“Jingle Bells” is silly in the worst of ways. It repeats the word “jingle” five times in the chorus alone. All bells jingle. That’s what they do. It’s their entire purpose. “Jingle Bells” details fun and completely normal activities like having a single horse drag you through the snow and … well, that’s it, really, but everyone has heard it hundreds if not thousands of times, so we’ve just kind of accepted it as a normal thing. Then again, it was composed in 1850 (and originally entitled “One Horse Open Sleigh”), so it’s not exactly the baseline for fun holiday activities.

Maybe that’s my point here. Almost all of the Christmas songs we know and have captor-bonded with are more than 60 years old. With the exception of a few pop renditions of these songs and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” there aren’t any new Christmas songs that have taken their place among “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “White Christmas.”

If you hear any given Christmas song 20 times a year (and that’s a conservative estimate), by the time you’re 18, you’ve heard that song 360 times. By the time you’re 30, you’ll have heard it 600 times. Personally, if I hear a song more than once an hour on the radio, I consider it to be poisoned by overplay. It’s time for some new holiday music.

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