#bobbyhelms

pop report #1 (1/7/23)

a glance at the US charts as we dance backwards dazed into a brand new year

The Christmas hangover – that vague viral thing where, still disoriented from January’s quick sideways punch, everyone agrees it’s OK to stay festive for a second – is one of the holiday’s loveliest gifts. That it comes with a mutual agreement not to continue certain seasonal obligations, like stressing over cooking or the exchanging of gifts, makes it all the sweeter. It feels in that stupid fun way like we’re all getting away with something. That, even as the calendar gives us its greatest opportunity to feel fresh and absolved – here you go, a whole new year you haven’t fucked up yet – we’ve still put one over on it, by not moving on from something frivolous.

In any case, I don’t know how long it takes the Billboard elves to tabulate whatever it is they tabulate, so it makes sense that the first week of January on the Hot 100 is very late December, though it purports to depict the most popular songs in the country in the exact first seven days of the month (one of which is still happening as the list is published). Most of the new top ten is residual Christmasness; it’s comforting in its way, like looking outside and seeing that the Statue of Liberty is still there (depending). The democracy reflected by these charts so rarely suggests the cynical things about humanity our leaders often do. We like joyful, familiar, apropos things.

Back in the very earliest album chart days, Bing Crosby’s White Christmas used to take the top slot every December. But then there was a long spell where the biggest sellers around the change of the year weren’t thematic. Yet these days, we basically vote on a Greatest Xmas Hits. We bow down to certain idols with a scary (if often explicable) lack of second thought, and Mariah’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”, #1 this week, is one of the most hallowed. The song is a made-to-order rush, retro and timeless at once, with Carey exuberant and irrepressible and commanding the way she is at her best – which is when she’s having a lot of fun, rather than being allowed to emote as indulgently as the contours of her dexterous voice will accommodate.

In a way, the very way she sings – the willful all-melisma approach – has dated, though that voice is so athletic and flexible it also depends a great deal on how it’s recorded. And of course, when the tempo picks up a certain amount she doesn’t have time to lean into that stuff so aggressively. So you forgive her the single’s intro, which is also impressive and soulful and silly and lovely (or some selection of those things) if you have no beef with it. The song has a bit of that tinny, glitzy sonic profile from a certain era of misguided trends. But it mostly just sounds good – it has a force, a brightness and arresting forward motion, and it glistens when the backup chorus spills out around the effortlessly powerful lead vocal.

#2, Brenda Lee’s reliably sexy “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, is from late ’58 – Brenda is the “uh-huh honey” of “Sweet Nothin’s”, so perfectly robbed and repurposed by a pre-fall Kanye for “Bound 2”, and the sheer conceivability that she does indeed say “fuckin’ pie” – she doesn’t, she says pumpkin pie – is tantalizing. The corny backup singers are a sign of the creeping corruption of pop pap into rock ‘n’ roll, but the salacious sax solo counterbalances it with a healthy dose of lusty hostility. This is the best kind of easy listening: a low simmer, pleasant for the lovers and leapers, lonely-hearts and lazyboneses alike. Half a century ago, this was shocking; now it soothes nerves while moving things along in the kitchen.

#3, Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock”, is less threatening, but it still has that soupçon of swagger – just enough sultry swing not to ruin the mood the way, say, a sudden switch to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir would. The band is good, especially the guitar, and while the chorus in this case is especially preppy-sounding, if you listen closely, you can tell they’re down to unwind. The message in theholiday trinity occupying win, place and show this week is that we do like even our most sentimental days to rock a little, to shake and move us, to take us on a ride – something other than hitched to poor reined-up horses in the cold for too much money.  We’re here for good times, and whatever the occasion – however we feel about Christianity – we’re ready to dance about, or around, it.

#4 is the ubiquitous “Last Christmas”, another nouveau standard (though I dunno, it’s forty years old). George Michael is an angel now, so we forgive him his sillier capitulations to the epoch at which he peaked. He really made them work – he was alluring and intelligent beyond his haircut, his drum machines, his bolder fashion choices, his partner. The grit and drama he peppers this wounded early valentine with aren’t the instincts of some vapid cherub. He sings like a Freddie Mercury with restraint, ductile and actorly. The holiday song is shockingly universal, even easier to befriend than the love song (both holidays and love reward and cost us), and this song is both kinds!

#5, Burl Ives, “A Holly Jolly Christmas” – we’re verging into corn, but still not there yet. This 1965 smash features a very good acoustic guitar player whose name I can’t find, though I’m admittedly not looking hard enough. Ives’ tone is naturally grandfatherly – unprovocative, but rough enough to go down right. He voices (and looks like) the snowman narrator in the Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, an admirably quirky special which I don’t think is very good. I have a small soft spot for the company’s Year Without a Santa Claus, but a much softer spot for the Chuck Jones Grinch and the flawless A Charlie Brown Christmas. I like my Xmas art a little dry, but welcome well-wielded sincerity. I’m no SCROOGE…

#6, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”, feels like a bit of a sleeper for a standard. It’s one of those pleasant, detail-rich ones that gets lost among the others, e.g. “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”, “Mistletoe and Holly”, “Silver Bells”. When it echoed in my mind I thought it was by Frank Sinatra, and it turns out it is in fact a 1963 recording by Boring Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams. The easy-listening flavor of a protracted moment, Andy Williams is best remembered (this is my suggestion) for a joke in one of the peak seasons of The Simpsons where Bart and his friends are on a road trip and bully Nelson violently demands they stop for a Williams concert. That’s the joke. It’s the juxtaposition of the—

One thing you can say for Williams’ (admittedly peppy) song is it increases the relief of #7, “Feliz Navidad”, a cliché that in the wrong mood can certainly exacerbate some ill will. But it’s usually another sugar rush. Jose Feliciano’s lilting acoustic guitar is always welcome at this velocity, and there’s a lot else happening, down to sweet secret strings sneaking through and tickling the corners of a track one might describe as “tastefully lush” if one were being a little kind. Feliciano could be super silly – listen to his live cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire”, where he briefly imitates an Irish priest for no reason. But he was also witty, seductive, compelling, a delight. And it’s nice when we break the English barrier the littlest damn bit.

(Spotify keeps switching to “Little Saint Nick”, and while I love the Beach Boys, I want to break a plate.)

Smashing through ceilings as ever, veteran juggernaut Taylor Swift bursts through the Christmas barrier at #8 with, talk about presents, my pick hit of the year, “Anti-Hero”. I consider it the shrewdest melody on her new collection of characteristically good ones, as well as her most interesting vocal on an album that could perhaps use more of that. The lyric is the coup, though, one of those simultaneous self-effacement/fuck yous she flirts with; it could be another tiresome kiss-off to the press or an honest, introspective missive to a lover (or a close circle of friends), and it toes that line like an advanced ballet student. Most of us could at some point stand to call ourselves out, and singing that this way makes it a lot easier to swallow.

Nat ‘King’ Cole was the very first artist with a number one on the Billboard album charts, back in 1945, and his presence at #9 in this week’s list of mostly vintage ornaments is a fair honor. His song (Robert Wells and Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song”, the chestnuts-roasting-on-an-open-fire one in the unlikely event that you needed a memory jog) is luxurious and not a little amorous, never over-orchestrated and crooned in that masterfully velvety way that earned this ‘King’ his crown. I think it’s also appropriate to herald here the persistent presence and frequent dominance of Black performers in our culture, going to back to the start of these little charts. Though this ten is color-lite – save for the #1 performer, Carey (depending on how Feliciano identifies).

I can also confirm Mr. Cole’s “Deck the Halls” – track 2 on his Christmas album – is a cringey, frosting-suffocated mess. But I should admit, it evoked a similar reaction to the first time I heard #10, Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy”, with its campy introductory choir. When someone means such choices sincerely, as Cole seems to with his “Deck the Halls”, it compounds an offense. But when it’s a bold choice in the name of camp, you have to open your heart and mind past a little reflex revulsion. “Unholy” is a treat, a great deal more fun than Smith usually is; they feed off of Petras’ vibrant sense of outrage. Good for the both of them: a landmark statistic (first out trans and nonbinary performers to hit #1) and a car banger.

The next ten hits are Christmas all the way down, save two – including #11, SZA’s slow-sinking “Kill Bill”, one of those downtempo-insistent hits that sticks with you before you understand why it’s hanging in there. Then it’s the often underrated Ariana Grande’s magic faux-soul up “Santa Tell Me”, and two Phil Spector (boo) triumphs for the Ronettes and Darlene Love (yay) respectively, “Sleigh Ride” and “Christmas”, which is the one, you know the one, the one that keeps going “CHRISTMAAAAAAAS” (“snow’s comin’ down…”). Those songs sandwich Kelly Clarkson’s feebler “Underneath the Tree”. Then there’s yuletide stuff from Bing, Nat (“Deck the Halls”, ugh), Dean, and Frank, plus David Guetta’s melodramatic “Blue” mistake.

The lights have already been taken down for the better part of the album chart. I think the SZA is a slow-grower, but America doesn’t – #1 all three of its charting weeks. However good SOS is, it’s nice when a smart and interesting artist who’s hung in there at just over the radar makes this kind of left-field splash, and with a record you can tell she’s really worked on. Next is Taylor, then the celebrated Michael Bublé’s Christmas album, Metro Boomin’s Heroes and Villains, which I’ve only played once (moody, macho hip-hop), a Nat ‘King’ Cole Xmas (so-so), that Drake/21 Savage album that seems sexist, Bad Bunny’s latest blockbuster, a Phil Spector’s Xmas (classic), a Mariah Xmas (classic?), and Vince Guaraldi/Charlie Brown (absolute classic).

This is MY ‘Jingle Bell Rock’! CLASSIC CHRISTMAS VIBES!

🎶🎊🎸