By Philip Michaels
December 15, 2014 2:52 PM PT
Holiday Playlist: Philip Michaels
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
[Philip Michaels worked at Macworld for more than a decade, and now is available for your freelance writing and editing needs.]
Really, I blame a lot of this on iTunes.
It’s hard to remember this, more than a decade after Steve Jobs cajoled and arm-twisted the music industry into selling electronic versions of songs for 99 cents, but in the Before Times, when one wanted music, one bought The Whole Damn Album. (If one did not want to feel like donning a ski mask and a switchblade as one downloaded songs illegally, of course.) So when you strolled the aisles of a store during the holiday season and came face to face with an entire array of Christmas CDs, you had to ask yourself this question: Do I really want to buy this entire Dean Martin CD of Christmas songs when only one, maybe two of the tracks will be any damn good? And thus was snuffed out another impulse buy.
iTunes knows no such mercy. You want to hear Dean-o crooning out “Silver Bells?” Be our guest, friend… and why don’t you download “It’s a Marshmallow World at Christmas” while you’re at it? You want John Denver twanging out Christmas songs? (With or without Muppets?) Kenny Chesney? Kenny G? Kenny from South Park? They are all there, adding their particular takes on holiday standards, and they can be yours with just the click of a button.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that the iTunes Store coupled with the impulse control of a magpie has caused my library of holiday tunes to swell like an overstuffed stocking in recent years. And that’s not necessarily because the songs I bought and paid for are all outstanding — far from it. Many are quite terrible, as I expounded on at length in an episode of a podcast that inexplicably keeps having me on and in an article for a website that stopped employing me. I guess when it’s 99 cents to $1.29, the prospect of downloading John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John dueting on a creepy-even-for-this-song version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for a good chuckle doesn’t seem so off-putting. Until you listen to the song, of course, and realize that you own it forever.
But we’re not here today to talk about regret. Jason asked me if I could write an article about good Christmas songs — songs that I actually like and would play around others without reservation during the holidays. This is probably because Jason is a relentlessly positive person, which is an absolutely off-putting trait if I’m being honest, though I suspect it’s also because he bet somebody that I couldn’t come up with a couple hundred words worth of niceness.
Well, I’ll take that bet.
