Ah yes, life in the boonies. No sooner did my life settle down enough for me to blog than the weather deities decided I needed to have some power outages during a big storm blow out my surge protectors, my battery backup, and my cable modem. Comcast just got me back up and running, I cleaned up the spam comments that snuck through the filters, and downloaded 2700 emails or so. Ouch.
For some serious holiday cognitive dissonance, I suggest the Irish Tenors' newest Christmas CD, which I bought for my mother. My brain very nearly exploded when they began singing, with appropriate tenorian orchestration, the Pogues' Fairytale of New York. You know, that wonderful Christmas standard that begins "It was Christmas Eve in the drunk tank" and contains the immortal lyrics:
You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last
Needless to say, the Irish Tenors edited out that particular stanza. The rest actually holds up quite beautifully to the smoothed out, over-produced, blandized treatment, which is true of many of Shane McGowan's messy, brilliant, lyrical, sloppily sentimental songs - just take out the obscenities and drug references and sing them happily on St. Patrick's Day. Or Christmas.
Still, I'll take toothless, drunken, word-slurring Shane any day, and I beg the Irish Tenors to promise not to ever, ever cover another Pogues' song. It's highly unlikely I'll survive the experience.
In the spirit of true godless liberalism, I wish everyone a wonderful holiday season. Snark.
Fairytale of New York is one of the Riggs household favorites as well, particularly with the scruffy-boy Englishman I married now living with me in New York. :) Sad that the woman doing the duet is no longer with us...
Posted by: Elayne Riggs | 24 December 2005 at 09:58 PM
Squinting, puzzled, I read that again and again and say..."What? Does this mean something?" Do I really care? Actually, no. Except it confounds me that anyone would.
Those are "immortal lyrics"? Falling out of the mouth of a toothless drunken bum yet?
Talk about your generational disconnect.
Posted by: Gil. | 29 December 2005 at 01:10 AM
That song always makes me feel so melancholy... something about the Celtic sound, combined with the memory of Kirsty MacColl, who died so close to Christmas in 2000. Your post prompted me to pick up a copy of Kirsty's compilation CD, "Galore", so her heirs thank you for the 50 cents or whatever you helped them earn ;-)
Posted by: Leigh-Ann | 30 December 2005 at 03:13 AM