Back when I started doing Rummage on air in July 2003, my first ever segment was devoted to song poems – recordings that came out of “music industry looking for new songwriter” ads that were once common in the back pages of many trashy magazines. (For more background on song poems, go to this earlier posting.) So this Christmas, I’ve decided to revisit them and on tomorrow’s show, I will be featuring the opening track from The American Song Poem Christmas album, Santa Came On A Nuclear Missile (mp3).
Lyrically, this song represents the most nihilistic Christmas narrative ever conceived. In it, Santa is transformed into a malevolent, hairless and militaristic alien who arrives on a weapon of mass destruction, and presents the terrified narrator with a laser gun… Unlike previous assaults on Christmas by easily neutralized bah-humbugging outsiders like Scrooge and the Grinch, this "destruction from within" is absolute and irresistible, and it leaves the narrator with little to do but lament the disappearance of all his/her “hopeful dreams”…
Faced with such a grim vision, what did the session musos hired to record it do? Well, they attempted to nullify it by coming up with the most upbeat arrangement possible. The recording opens with the sound of an exploding bomb, but after that, its all breezy organ and lively vocals with only a vague hint of melancholy… Christmas never sounded so gear-grindingly cognitively dissonant…