by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the annual NBC special Christmas at Rockefeller
Center — it’s indicative of how
preposterously the holiday season has got stretched out that it isn’t even
December and already the Christmas specials are coming on — which turned out to
be a pleasant show with a lot of the seasonal classics. With all the
controversy surrounding the Left’s so-called “war on Christmas” (President
Trump, being the asshole he always is, insisted that during his entire
eight-year term in the Presidency Barack Obama had never publicly uttered the
word “Christmas,” and of course MS-NBC responded with a long montage of Obama
publicly saying “Merry Christmas” throughout his presidency), it was
interesting that virtually all the song selections were from the secular end of
the Christmas repertoire — only at the very end of the show, when the Harlem
Gospel Choir came out to sing “Joy to the World” (they weren’t seen on screen,
just heard over the closing credits, and their rendition didn’t sound
particularly gospel-ish but it was
nice), was there any of that bothersome stuff about Jesus or the Savior or
redeeming humanity from its sins or any of the Christian mythos the defenders of “Christmas” in the so-called “war”
are supposedly defending. The show opened with Harry Connick, Jr., whose big
band was used as the backup for almost everybody who performed, doing a nicely
swinging version of Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” following which Gwen
Stefani came out for one of the few new songs on the program, “My Gift Is You.”
It’s a pretty well-established sub-genre of the Christmas song — the singer tells his or her lover that they
don’t have to get them anything because they are the best present s/he could
possibly receive — but Stefani wrote and sang it quite nicely (indeed, “nice”
seems to be the adjective that most comes to mind describing this entire
program). The show followed the usual pattern of these sorts of things — one
song per artist, two songs and then cut to a commercial break — and after the
first break Pentatonix, an a cappella vocal group that’s become inexplicably popular, did a pretty unsexy
version of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” Just about everybody has ignored the pretty obvious sexual implications
of this song, but Pentatonix went further than most in de-sexing it. I also
continued to be annoyed by Pentatonix’ use of a drum machine — when I first
heard them I thought they were cheating and using a real drum machine, Later I
found out it’s really one of the Penatatonickers vocally duplicating the sound of a drum machine, but that still doesn’t
make me like the sound any better. Then a country singer named Brett Eldridge
did “Winter Wonderland” and phrased it almost exactly the way Tony Bennett had
when he recorded it — Aretha Franklin’s wild (if ridiculously overarranged)
record in the early 1960’s for Columbia might have been a better model for him,
but doing Tony Bennett worked just fine, thank you.
After the next commercial
break someone or something called Auli’i Cravalho, who’s apparently a minor
star on some NBC show or other (and one wonders how she got that multicultural
name, which looks like a mashup of Portuguese and Hawai’ian) did an O.K.
version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” that won’t make me forget Brenda
Lee’s version (or the surprisingly good Partridge Family record with the
recently departed David Cassidy on lead vocal, which remains my favorite cover)
but was still nice — and Connick’s tenor sax soloist duplicated the sax solo on
the original record almost exactly. Next up was a young man named Leslie Odom,
Jr., an African-American introduced as a jazz singer; he isn’t, really, but his
version of “Please Come Home for Christmas” showcased a nice, high voice whose
range in itself gave the song a different cast from Charles Brown’s sexy
baritone; once again, it paled next to the original but was a nice (that word
again!) and thoroughly pleasant cover. The next artist up after the inevitable
commercial break was Seal, whom I remember from his explosive debut (and whom I
immediately formed an intense crush on!) but whose career pretty much seems to
have petered out — he’s resorted to one of the gimmicks a lot of people use
when their main career starts to fade, which is to cut a standards album (as
Willie Nelson did to great effect and Rod Stewart did terribly — and I have so
far chosen not to subject myself to Bob Dylan’s bizarre assaults on the Great
American Songbook; in the 1980’s he did “Soon” as part of a PBS gala honoring
the memory of George Gershwin, and that was the last time I ever want to hear
Dylan singing a standard), and he contributed a version of “It’s the Most
Wonderful Time of the Year” which almost uncannily duplicated Johnny Mathis’s
phrasing on the song (from one of his later Christmas LP’s: Mathis’s first
seasonal album, Merry Christmas,
I think is by far his best work; on this album, and especially on the sacred
songs that made up side two of the original LP, Mathis turned down that
annoying cat-like vibrato of his, dropped his other affectations and sang with
more power, sincerity and soul than ever before or since). Then the pop-rock
band Train did what appeared to be an original and seemed to be called “Shake
Up Christmas” — they aren’t exactly world-beaters but, like so much of the
material here, it was nice and engendered good holiday feelings.
After the next
break came a Canadian trio called The Tenors — but don’t let the quasi-operatic
name fool you: these guys are solidly pop, and their song was announced as
“Santa’s Wish” but actually turned out to be the old Coca-Cola jingle “I’d Like
to Teach the World to Sing” that got released as a single in the early 1970’s
and actually became a surprise hit (and inspired the Pepsi-Cola company to
commission John Lennon, of all people, to compose a similar pop song extolling their product: ultimately they didn’t use it, but if you’re curious it’s on Lennon’s 1973
solo LP Mind Games). After that
came perhaps the best song of the evening, Jennifer Nettles — who’s so
convincing a soul singer that if I’d just listened to this instead of watching her I’d have had no idea
she was white — doing “Celebrate Me Home” and pouring her heart and soul into
her performance instead of reaching for the bland holiday niceness (that word
again!) which contented the other performers. The final break featured the
Radio City Rockettes (inevitably) dancing to a song called “Let Christmas
Shine” sung by an offstage chorus (probably a recorded one), and the Rockettes
are what they’ve always been — though it was nice, and a sign of the human progress we’ve made
before the Trump administration reverses it all, that there was a Black
Rockette right in the middle of the lineup dancing and kicking up her legs in
perfect unison with the white ones. The tree-lighting itself was predictably
spectacular, and there was an intriguing announcement that after the holiday
season the tree is going to be processed into lumber and donated to Habitat for
Humanity so it can be used to build housing for homeless people — a nice (that
word again!) example of the
altruistic oldthink that won’t be around much longer in the Age of Trump.
