#357

Factually Musical 2023 is slated to end today. This has been excellent, for me anyway. It's what I wanted and didn't get from Album Week 2019, and it's what I was pursuing with all subsequent installments of Album Week, but could only grasp fleetingly.

Maybe it didn't make a ton of difference to you, dear reader, and maybe it did, but writing, though ostensibly much more about symbols and ideas than music is reckoned to be, is really identically all about feelings, because feelings are after all the only really real thing in this embodied existence we are consigned to. Factually Musical 2023 has felt incredible to generate. I hope that comes through. Tempted, and sorely, to kick off the nascent year with Factually Musical 2024, because I have a ton more ideas I didn't get to discuss and maybe I don't want them to have to wait very long.

It's Christmas Eve. Didn't plan this at the outset because I have been extremely unstuck in time, extremely chronoaberrant, but I realized what had happened and of course today's post will center on Christmas music.

*

A subject with some trauma around it! How many people do you think made it as far as this sentence? Let's acknowledge this: way more people spent their larval stages listening to Christmas music than are willing to tolerate even the concept of it as fully developed insects.

You can blame the fall of man, the decay of any given church/society, the gay agendas and the wars on Christmas if you want, but I blame retail environments. I also blame the Coca-Cola company and Sears and Roebuck back in the day ands a whole other slew of commercial shit plus ecosocioreligious and legal shit, none of which is the point: let's stay with retail environments and the pathetic disgusting fucking crack of an asshole Christmas music they dump into our ears like sun-warmed chumcum*.

Oh! And the Santa Lie. I'm not going to be gentle: you gotta be a fucking moron to continue to propagate that shit. The Santa lie is responisble for everything the tellers of the lie find abhorrent in the post-reveal behavior of their progeny and of the direction this nation of liars has taken (the logical consequence of fucking telling yourself and your children lies upon lies upon lies, all the fucking god damn time. Merry Fucking Christmas).

The so-called cooperative I used to work at didn't play any holiday music at all. Same shit all year. No offense to anyone, ever, no matter what. Customers would complain aggressively if a neophyte put Chrismas music on the system. It was that kind of place, in that kind of town.

* 

Sinatra and Crosby are bearable, also that guy that inspired Dino Spumoni in Hey Arnold!. I don't love their Christmas music any more than I love when a contemporary music star puts out something forgettable and mercenary for the post-holiday paycheck, but the old crooners don't get played as much in your average store or market, is why when my mom wants to put those CD's on, I don't pitch a fit or anything. Honestly though the arrangements are not very inspiring and it's not exactly like the dudes are being their most authentic selves out here with these empty-minded, watered-down little covers and children's songs. A whole generation disagrees, you say? They ate and breathed a lot of fucking lead coming up, I reply. I may have plastic all throughout my body and even my cells, but at least I'm not medically brain-damaged and only treated as normal because my entire cohort is too.

Just kidding! Every living thing has trace lead too. Mercury, other heavy metals. Down beneath the plastic, holding hands with PFAS in the bloodstream and the folds of the brain. Party down, fuckers! We're the poisoned billions! We might be beyond help! Woooooooo!

*

Ok, time to skew positive. Well, my highly subjective version of positive. At any rate that's quite enough vitriol, thank you. 

John Denver and The Muppets made a Christmas record which is the first CD I remember putting in myself and which is the first music I remember dancing all-out to and crying a little about. It's a big deal to me, maybe I've mentioned it before. The Christmas music Sufjan Stevens puts out has been much more important and vital to me than any of his other music. From actual arrangements of  Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" to all kinds of arrangements for all kinds of versions of The Nutcracker and The Mouse King, those are definitely some kind of Christmas music. Music made for adaptations off Dr. Seuss's How The Grinch Stole Christmas, including the--to my mind--critically underrated and misunderstood Ron Howard version, definitely Christmas. The jazz continuum offers a lot of great options besides that, including--I'll allow it, I have to admit I've gotten down to it--Harry Conick Jr.  

On that note, deserving its own paragraph, The Peanuts Christmas Special may be the most genius Christmas music ever made, one of the best Christmas things ever as a whole.

*

Something that seems like quite the opposite of that but, you know, music is music and it's all kind of the same no matter how different it seems. 

M. Loer is a name and a place and it is definitely not Christmas music, but it's something else, somethings ranging from two-hour sound collages exhibiting the vastness of an empty atmosphere being filled slowly with the birth shrieks of an unthinkable pandemonium or short experiments largely consisting of overloading circuitry just enough to destroy the reality of the sound recording and substitute a new and substantially less predictable one. 

Len and I did indeed get together and record more sounds, very different than anything on the channel but we will see how it sounds once he's done tinkering with it and if he decides to post any of it. On some of the slightly older videos, I am featured as Ahrimanic Cathedral. It's the best name I could come up with in the middle of thinking about a bunch of other stuff. 

*

The full library of Christmas songs, if such a thing were realized, would contain, I think, among the most beautiful compositions and performances of music through the course of history. Sacred music of any description contains within in a mote of the sublime, no matter how bastardized or mangled. You know, even that shit I hate so badly that they pump over the radio like with a grown woman singing like a five-year old some lyrics about putting Santa's cock in her chimney or whatever, if they bring people the feelings of Christmas that they need, then I accept them. I let it go. Is Frozen Christmas music? If you need it to be. 

Sanctity is just like that. May you have, despite all these bastards and all this mangling, a Merry Christmas, and may the new year see our feasting and bring itself around.

The long night is behind us, and new life ahead. 

--JL

*chumcum is chum, which is basically whatever solid waste you are able to dump into a bucket once you've finished swabbing the deck of fishing boat plus raiding the kitchen trash cans for anything compostable, with human seminal emissions mixed in. It's a lot more appetizing than the Christmas songs you're likely to hear in the average shopping environment from the first of november to about sometime in February.