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 21st 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.
