The Christmasization of classic rock

It is December, which means it is the time for the “genre” of Christmas music.

Although categorized as a unique genre, it is really more of a lyrical motif. And despite the fact that Christmas standards are ubiquitous and eventually become viewed as timeless, they are generally very much of their time.

Many of the genre’s staples came from post-World War II, pre-rock and roll traditional pop from the likes of Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, and Andy Williams, and Christmas songs did not deviate musically from non-Christmas music. “Run Rudolph Run” bears a resemblance to Chuck Berry’s most famous song, “Johnny B. Goode”. Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” is drenched in New Wave synthesizers. Run DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis” is very much golden age rap-rock, and while perhaps the most recent addition to the Christmas zeitgeist, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You”, does have retro elements, the same could be said of Mariah Carey’s entire brand of pop-R&B.

“All I Want for Christmas Is You” came out in 1994. There have been some new compositions since then, some moderately successful commercially, but the doors seem to be closed to become a standard. For instance, although Taylor Swift wrote new material for her 2007 Christmas EP “The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection”, her radio success came from covers of Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby” and Wham’s “Last Christmas”.

Christmas music is a unique genre, if you want to call it that: its songs are played for a month and disappear for the next eleven. “Summer songs” exist but aren’t nearly as seasonally relegated as “Winter Wonderland”. Additionally, Christmas music is where old genres never die. Rockabilly, a genre which otherwise faded in the 1950s (even revivalists like the Stray Cats were more closely imitating early rock and roll, a genre which was basically rockabilly minus bluegrass), continues to exist in the form of “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”. And it will seemingly exist forever, as the appetite for new Christmas music, at least for radio, seems relatively low.

The same can be said for the music genre I’ve spent more time in my life consuming than any other—classic rock. The reason that I would listen to music from my parents’ youth was not because I was trying to be consciously retro or revolt against my own generation—it was because the songs were really good and to my untrained ears, they were new. In 2002, I listened to AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses as much as I listened to the White Stripes because, while I literally knew which ones were older, it didn’t make a difference.

But in 2017, I rarely listen to classic rock radio. I still listen to older music, but it’s usually deeper cuts than the staples of the radio format. Classic rock radio grew stale because it’s the same songs, over and over, and has been for as long as I can remember. The cut-off for “classic” was Nirvana and Pearl Jam in the early 2000s and today, with the occasional exception of the Foo Fighters (who debuted four years after the big grunge breakthrough), it remains the same.

I suspect this ties in to why people hate Nickelback.

To borrow a phrase from Uproxx’s Steven Hyden, hating Nickelback has become “a Default Smart Opinion”, a thing people espouse with such ease that it starts to lose meaning. The problem with Nickelback hate isn’t that those who think they are bad are wrong—it’s that Nickelback is not uniquely bad. And indeed, they are not the first go-to band to fashionably claim to hate. But they’ve been that band for about 15 years now. This is a problem, less because it’s unfair to Nickelback (though it is—Journey and Bon Jovi weren’t still getting heckled in the 1990s and 2000s), but because it reflects a lack of movement in rock trends.

Journey received hate because they were viewed as a watered-down version of early Aerosmith or late-prime Rolling Stones. Bon Jovi was stadium rock that couldn’t hold a candle to Bruce Springsteen or U2. And Nickelback was the embodiment of generic post-grunge. For a few years, this was fine. But they are still that band. And that is because there hasn’t been a rock act close to as big as Nirvana since Nirvana. U2 still plays stadiums and releases perfectly fine albums, but they no longer captivate the international consciousness.

But Nickelback is also hurt because they essentially are a classic rock band, just decades too late. They are the 21^st century version of Def Leppard, a band which had detractors but was able to gracefully slide into irrelevance thanks to the rock ecosystem. There hasn’t been a reason to bother hating Def Leppard for decades. Nickelback should get the same treatment.

Classic rock, like Christmas radio, doesn’t want new additions to the playlist because they market not on growth or even quality but on nostalgia. For an impressionable kid who can recognize the sheer joy of listening to Jimi Hendrix or The Who, this makes classic rock radio desirable, but the lack of expansion means it exists mostly for baby boomers who didn’t give such reverence to Glenn Miller but expect millennials to give it to Pink Floyd. And Christmas stations don’t want to upset the applecart, which is why “Baby It’s Cold Outside” will never go away despite the obvious reason it should. It’s not about promoting (heinous) values. It’s about maintaining the status quo.

I’ve never been into Christmas music because I’ve never been into the pre-rock and roll music that comprises most of it, but I have deeply cared about classic rock. And I desperately hope it does not fall into the same rabbit hole, thriving on one selling point until it eventually becomes so unnecessary that it can only emerge from the shadows for one month a year before we all become sick of it.

An attempt to develop confidence in my late twenties

I don't remember how old I was when I started making friends. Like, not "kid you play with at school because you want to play and, hey, there's somebody" but people that I would hang out with outside of a formal setting. I think it was in third grade, though I'm not sure--I think this is probably later than most, but it was never really a thing my parents actively forced (I have no idea if forced socialization of children towards people they might or might not like is a good thing or a bad thing or neutral--just an observation). But I had developed things I liked--I liked sports, I liked video games, I knew other kids from school who liked sports and video games, so hey, let's hang out and play sports and video games. Not that complicated.

One time, when I was about to go to a friend's house, I was getting excited, as little kids do, and probably annoying my dad about it. So he told me something which absolutely crushed my spirit. "You know, he doesn't actually like you. He's just trying to be nice."

What he said was probably not true. If it was true, he would have no way of knowing that it was. And yet, nearly twenty years later, I remember that. It has stuck, sometimes at the forefront of my own personal psyche and other times laying dormant in the back of my mind.

My personal insecurities are something which I have had difficulty overcoming throughout my life. I have lived in a constant state of inadequacy and developed a strong sense that I stand out for all the wrong reasons. And the often-subconscious belief that I am constantly being humored and that I am a social burden remains, no matter how much I try to tell myself that it is all in my head.

To be clear, this is not a reflection on my friends, who are wonderful people and who have given me no actual reason to believe that they invite me to social events as a matter of pity. Some people reading this, I'm sure, are among my truly close circle of friends. Others are people with whom I interact sporadically, maybe "only" on Twitter (while there are certain limits to them, I don't consider Twitter friendships to be irrelevant). And some are people who have read and enjoy my writing, about which the overwhelming majority of comments are positive, or at least constructive or engaging in their usually minor and fair criticisms.

But I constantly try to find ways that I am an outsider. Many of my friends are (slightly) younger than I am, so I internalize myself as the old guy. Many come from more affluent backgrounds, and as a ripple effect, I often find that my life experiences do not put me in a position to relate. Many have significant others or are closer with their families than I am and it's tough to relate to their experiences, as my social structure and motivations are necessarily different.

These were always problems for me, but it was easier at 22 to tell myself that things would change and it wasn't worth worrying about than it is at 28. And I'm still the same shy kid who was insecure about his ability to relate to other people. Because I still will see myself as somebody being patronized, like my dad implied was the norm. I'm the kind of person who will still jump on invitations to do just about anything unless he gets the impression that the invitation was done more out of obligation than actual desire to spend time with me.

In the last month, I've deactivated my Twitter account twice, and I've taken a few additional brief hiatuses in which I would still check the app but would not actively tweet. I did so because I was in a fairly depressed state, and while some are believers in the "tweet through it" method of dealing with anxiety or depression, I try to avoid it--mainly, I worry that it will add to the unhappiness of others, particularly if somebody perceives me as having less reason to be unhappy than they do.

At the moment that I am typing this sentence, I am in a fairly good mood, but as recently as five days ago, I was barely getting out of bed. I'm not naive enough to pretend that I'm "cured" of whatever insecurities drove this in the first place. It's not that sad thoughts don't enter my brain--they do a few times a day on even the best days, but on the best days, they don't last long. I hope that I'm done with Twitter breaks, because as much as I complain about it, I really do enjoy Twitter by and large and think it is a useful tool. But if I'm not, this is probably why.

I don't know if I'll ever be truly confident. There's a reason I refuse to read comments section on things I write. There's a reason I will avoid opening Twitter on days when I write something I wasn't especially proud of. But my hope is that every day, every week, and every year, I can get a little bit closer.

Ted Cruz did not own Deadspin

On Tuesday evening, noted internet sports tabloid Deadspin ran a link to a post from Monday entitled "Send Us Proof of Ted Cruz Playing Basketball." I don't understand why. If the worst thing you can say about Ted Cruz is that he might be lying about or embellishing his basketball acumen, you might literally be police. He's just absolutely godawful in ways beyond the typical, "member of party that is lining up behind the dumbass whims of Donald Trump".

Again, I don't understand the post or why anyone cares about these things. I don't care if Paul Ryan dabs, because the problem I have with Paul Ryan isn't that he's trying to a Cool Dad as much as the whole "condemning tens of millions of poor people to death and/or suffering so that he can get a tax cut" thing.

But Cruz responded, and it was pretty good. He sent a picture of Grayson Allen, the wildly unlikable star of the wildly unlikable Duke basketball program, who also happens to look a shocking amount like Ted Cruz. See, if Deadspin had done this to Trump, it would set off a Totally Not Mad Online tangent the world is not yet prepared to face. But Cruz poked fun (a small amount of fun, but still) at himself and it was fine.

Ted Cruz did not own Deadspin. He did not dunk on Deadspin. He basically did the Twitter equivalent of appearing on SNL.

And Deadspin did not own Cruz by responding "Go eat shit." But this wasn't even kind of funny. It was essentially the direct-to-video sequel to when they told Donald Trump "Go fuck yourself", the latter being one of the ten greatest tweets in history.

The key is context: Donald Trump was basically engaging in entry-level starfuckery. He saw Deadspin getting a ton of (deserved) kudos for breaking the too-weird-to-believe Manti Te'o story and Trump decided to make things all about him. He didn't even bother to get all of the names to credit correct. He couldn't have given less of a shit about that. He wanted to make Deadspin's crown jewel in actual tabloid journalism all about himself. He deserves to be mocked.

Cruz just made a semi-clever and ultimately benign joke. He then proceeded to respond to Deadspin's shit-eating reply with a decade-plus out of date Anchorman joke, because he's actually the least funny person alive. But the first reply was good. It just wasn't an own.