… but it’s easy to forget this a Christmas time in my household. My family insists on playing his Christmas album every year, and this year I realized it embodies almost everything I hate about Christmas. The repetition, the aping of various ethnic traditions, the Andrews sisters, the artificial nostalgia.
The funny things is, I saw Bing in High Society and I thought he was pretty good. Perhaps the Christmas album is the low point in everyone’s musical career. Every bloody some ding-dong in my family pulls out all the old vinyl. We are spared the Barbra Streisand, but Bing always get first (and often) last shot at the turntable. I’ve told them how much I hate that record, but I suppose they love it so much they must think I"m kidding.
Oh I don’t know - about a million years ago, I dated Bing’s nephew for awhile, and the family stories weren’t that flattering.
As far as Xmas music goes, some time ago I bought a nice Reggae licorice pizza, and it’s become my favorite Xmas album. (Isn’t it sad that they don’t make vinyl [much] anymore?)
StoryTyler
“Not everybody does it, but everybody should.” I Spy Ty.
I have a pavlovian response to the Bing Crosby Christmas album. I heard it nearly every Christmas for over 40 years, and if I’m having trouble getting into the Christmas “mood”, all I need to hear is one or more tracks and my sappy sentimentality tank just slops over with Christmas nostalgia.
On December 26, back it goes to the archive.
As far as aping various ethnic traditions, it was a product of it’s time. Are they still doing the same thing today? If everyone banished the elements of the past which jarred their sensibilities, someone would have put some pants on Michelangelo’s David by now. Get a grip.
Of course it’s different. The past is a foreign country with strange, offensive, and sometimes incomprehensible customs. My parents were from Arkansas during the 1930s. Can you even imagine a time when it was considered polite to refer to African-Americans as “colored folks”?
(My father was born in Fort Smith, AR, in 1920.)
I had heard some really disturbing–or even just quirky–things about Der Bingle, which seem to show he really has feet of clay:
*He was a heavy drinker.
*Perhaps under the influence, he beat his four sons by his first wife; maybe Gary Crosby’s recent death can be ascribed to this.
*He lied to Who’s Who in America about his birth year, giving it as 1904 when it was really (Tom Burnam, More Misinformation) 1904.
*He was bald–that’s why he always wore hats.
*He was color blind–which explains the garish colors in his clothes.
Wow, I think you have a far more serious interpretation of my OP than I intended. If Michelangelo’s David came to my house for Chistmas every year, I would ask him to put his pants on. That wasn’t intended seriously either. I just think it’s weird that the rest of my family is so obsessively attached attached to a piece of music I find so abhorrent. It’s not necessarily they that are weird; I could be the weird one just as easily.
The point is, if a piece of music is going to be played hundreds of times over several decades, it had better be very good and full of nuances. Mozart might be able to stand up to this kind of rotation; Tschaikovsky is starting to wheeze and creak; Crosby’s Christmas album is a corpse in advanced stages of decomposition.
You are speaking heresy, sir! Der Bingle swings & sways! Der Bingle is cool! Boris B., however; is a man who was regularly beaten by a moose. 'Nuff said.
“Show me a sane man, and I will cure him for you.”----Jung
Hey! It was all the woman’s fault! Who gave her the right to be that much taller than me anyway? Stalin?!
And the moose had help from a little critter which vill be beeg trouble for bats’ claim to be the only flying mammal, if the skvirrel keeps evolving, dat is.
According to Gary Giddins, author of VISIONS OF JAZZ and other seminal texts, Bing is one of the Four Horsemen of 20th century pop music male vocalizing, alongg with Al Jolson, Sinatra, and Elvis.
Bing was the first to properly utilize the electric microphone. In his younger days, he was one cool hepcat, performing fine jazz vocals with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, tipping bootleg whiskey glasses with Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer, and making flapper hearts flutter.
All that being said and proper deference being paid, that double Christmas CD bugs the living hell out of me, too.
My Xmas was not complete this year, as I did not hear Charo’s famous rendition of “Silent Night,” containing her deathless reading of “slip in heavenly piss.”
agains them!