Amazon, America, And The Christmas Song Business
Are the everything giant's holiday exclusives any good?
Over at The Bulwark, I wrote a piece I’ve had in my head for a couple of years now, and finally put together: a commentary on/semi-review of Amazon’s original Christmas songs.
Whenever I don’t like a song playing on my Amazon Echo, I ask, “What song is this?” and more often than not they’re Amazon recordings. So there’s that. Many, however, are covers, and it’s the originals that I’m reviewing here.
From the piece:
I’ve noticed something curious, listening to Christmas music on my Amazon Echo: the “Amazon Music Original” Christmas songs. I say “curious” and not “surprising,” because of course an Amazon device is going to push Amazon-published music, much of which is exclusive to Amazon’s platforms, at least initially (you’d think this might raise some sort of antitrust issue, but who’s looking?).
What’s curious about it to me is not the economics of streaming platforms and exclusive content. Rather, it’s the fact that Amazon has published and distributed more than fifty Christmas songs, a streak that began in 2014 but truly took off in 2018 with Katy Perry’s Amazon exclusive “Cozy Little Christmas.” That’s a lot of cultural production in a rather fallow time for decent holiday music.
My initial reaction, a few years ago when I first learned that Amazon was actually acting as a record label, and releasing exclusive (at least for a time) Christmas songs too, was something like consternation that this corporate giant had even tried to colonize the holidays.
But as I thought about it, I kind of grew to like it. Amazon, for better or worse, is very much a middlebrow, mainstream American company, and defines in some way much of American life. Though often compared to Walmart, it’s probably—at least in its customer-facing role, which is only a little bit of everything it does—more like Sears.
A funny bit of trivia about Sears was that they found interesting ways to sell private-label products. Most known, of course, are Kenmore appliances, which were made by companies like Whirlpool and generally very similar to models sold under the manufacturer’s own name.
More interesting than that was the Sears Tele-Games video game console, which was a rebadged Atari 2600. Sears even published and exclusively distributed three Atari-developed games for their Tele-Games system! That’s like if Amazon sold a rebadged PlayStation 5—say, the Amazon GameStation V game console—and Sony developed games for it that could only be bought or downloaded from Amazon itself.
That’s all to observe that there’s nothing particularly newfangled about a powerful merchandising company flexing its muscles in interesting ways.
And Amazon getting into Christmas songs strikes me as a kind of reawakening of something that is a bit out of style (though to be sure still done by many recording artists). It seems fitting that today’s Sears would do something so American.
Unfortunately, most of them are kind of halfhearted—fine background radio sound, but nothing that’s likely to be played decades from now. Of course they’re not written by Amazon, but one imagines they’re commissioned by Amazon, and in many cases are probably written to achieve a certain kind of finished product. (Quite a few of them sound distinctly like other, better Christmas songs. It’s the difference, kind of, between the early Beatles and the Monkees and the label behind them intentionally engineering an early-Beatles sound.)
Here’s a little bit of the song analysis:
Carrie Underwood belts out “It’s music to my ears” to sum up a long list of things she’s just rattled off, none of which have anything to do with music, or with hearing anything—“stockings on chimneys, angels on the trees, sugar and cinnamon” and other seasonal summonings. (It’s almost as if someone decided that if Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” could come to be treated as a Christmas song, that was a formula worth copying.) And if you close your eyes, you can almost hear Underwood singing the line “All I want for Christmas is you” instead of “Christmas is my favorite time of year.”
Meanwhile, Dan + Shay sing, of the freshly cut Christmas tree, “And when we get back home, plug it in and watch it glow.” Did you pick an electric, artificial tree from the farm outside the snowy little Hallmark downtown?
I also briefly discuss my own favorite recent original Christmas song (not an Amazon original):
In my opinion, the best of the post-1994 new Christmas songs is probably Ariana Grande’s 2014 “Santa Tell Me.” It’s perfectly produced and actually pleasant to listen to, which is more than you can say for a lot of these noisy Amazon songs. And its subject matter is mature but earnest (“I won’t have sex with a guy who won’t commit to me”), a combination our society could use so much more of. It’s something of an original thought for a mainstream Christmas song, and it is executed very well.
That ability to do something mature but earnest is rare. Most of the original songs either feel a bit cynical, or just rehash a long list of Christmas imagery and don’t really say anything. That said, I don’t mind hearing them on the radio (or on an Echo Christmas music rotation).
Check out the whole piece, and merry Christmas!
The Christmas Song Cultural Barometer
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If you've ever attended a recent 3rd grade holiday pageant, you have likely encountered some tunes and melodies you have not heard before. There seems to be a parallel business of writing innocuous, non-sectarian holiday songs specifically to be performed at such events.