Christmas music: love it or hate it, you can't escape it. Rock 'n' rollers have been trying to make peace with the season since "Jingle Bell Rock", with decidedly mixed results. But who does it better, us Yanks or the Brits? Sounds like it's time for a no-holds-barred, hell-bent-for-eggnog throwdown between Merrie Olde England and the upstart colonies...
Glam Singalong Division: this time of year, Slade's "Merry Christmas Everybody" rules the muzak at the High Street shops...
...while Billy Squier's "Christmas Is The Time To Say I Love You" rings throughout every shopping mall in the U.S.A.
I gotta give love to Slade here, but Squier makes a respectable showing for the Stars and Stripes. Our dorky VJ style is no match for their dayglo-stovepipe-hat style. UK 1, USA 0.
Whimsical Power-Pop Division: probably the greatest song ever written about being mugged while dressed as Santa Claus, the Kinks' "Father Christmas" will be tough to beat...
...and so it is, with the Fountains of Wayne delivering their usual catchy, harmonized, nagging, cloying guitar-pop on "I Want An Alien For Christmas".
Don't get me wrong, compared to most Christmas music, "Alien" is like finding a pony under the tree. But you best not step to "Father Christmas", son. UK 2, USA 0.
Prog-Rock Pomposity Division: ELP Brit-wanker Greg Lake manages to restrain his most grandiose impulses for three-and-a-half minutes for this faux-medieval 1975 number, complete with camels, wise men, and inexplicable Vietnam War footage...
..but "restraint" is a dirty word to Buffalo-born PBS favorites Trans-Siberian Orchestra, whose "Carol of the Bells" ought to keep them on Santa's naughty list for life.
When your country's representative gets beaten soundly by somebody from Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, that's the kind of national humiliation nations never recover from. The Vietnam stuff is just salt in the wound. UK 3, USA 0.
Tearjerker Division: come on, dudes - maybe we can't win this thing, but we can at least get on the board, right? Band Aid's manipulative charity all-star synth jam "Do They Know It's Christmas?" can't be that hard to beat, can it?...
...Yes, it can, if the best we can do is an even more cheaply manipulative hunk of humbug entitled "Christmas Shoes" by something called Newsong. Not even the megawatt star power of Rob Lowe is enough to rescue this Christmas disaster. Make sure you have an airsickness bag handy.
Your eyes and ears do not deceive you. It's a song about a kid trying to buy his dying mother a pair of shoes on Christmas Eve so she'll look her best when she "meets Jesus tonight". The Newsong frontman gets into the spirit by sporting his prettiest, specialest baseball hat for the occasion. "Daddy says there's not much time", and I just wasted five minutes of it on this abomination. That makes the sweep complete: UK 4, USA 0. America sits humbled before their Noel-rock masters. I guess we all have to start eating figgy pudding now. Anybody know what figgy pudding is?
