Anyway, today I’ve hauled our Rhian in to talk about Fairytale of New York, the Pogues’ and Kirsty MacColl’s Christmas anthem. The following is our email discussion about the song, the 1980s, folk music, and class politics.

Grab a whiskey.

Happy Christmas Your Arse

Rhian: I think one reason the song is so popular is because it seems like an oddity – it’s highly secular, the only mention of anything to do with Christmas is the setting, and it dissects romantic sentimentalism rather than replicating it – the lyric is of a part with the rest of the Pogues’ tragicomic gutter-poetry dealing with addiction, nihilism, prostitution, police corruption and brutality. Besides making it stand out among other seasonal songs, this also makes it the choice of the Christmas refusenik. In another way, of course, its depiction of dysfunctional relationships, exhaustion, frustration, frayed tempers and failed dreams make it the perfect song for Christmas as emotional pressure-valve.

Miranda: Yeah, it manages a keen balancing act of romantic and antiromantic, if you will – it sways between “I’ve built my dreams around you” and “you’re an old slut on junk” so deftly that I can never decide whether its final notes leave me depressed or hopeful. It’s got that whole “we’re ruined, irrevocably, and yet I love you” vibe, without ever straying into ‘stand by your man’ territory.

Queen of New York City

Rhian: Kirsty’s character makes a good subversive girl-next-door, overcoming taboos around female profanity, the place of women in a relationship, and the female as uncritically supportive of and subservient to the male. (After punk, and apart from Madonna maybe, which other mainstream late-80s female singers – especially folk/pop – compare with her vocal here for casual, combative profanity that matches, if not outdoes, her partner?)

I remember watching a ‘Making of…’ documentary on this song in which one of the Pogues was describing Kirsty’s efforts to overcome her stagefright when doing the song on tour with them, and recalled that on the first night they performed it, the crowd joined in with her, rather than Shane, on the ‘I could’ve been someone’ / ‘Well, so could anyone’ rejoinder. Which made me think about her part as the one with which listeners identify, the long-suffering steadfast partner/friend who finally talks back, providing much-needed perspective, however depressing that is, and the relief and catharsis that doing so brings. It’s like she speaks for all the women slaving over Xmas dinner for ungrateful kids and husbands.

Miranda: Although Shane’s character asserts a kind of ownership of Kirsty’s dreams (he’s the one who takes, builds, attempts to reassure her that she sits at the centre of the dream it sounds like he screwed up), he starts the song imprisoned in the “drunk tank” – implying she’s a dream, this woman, a figure from times past. So maybe where she is now – free, perhaps, who knows? – is left open. And I think that’s another thing that underpins the bittersweet, shady-grey spirit of this song. It’s never clear whose story this is, and there’s a real tension between her narrations and his, which draw the song back to a romantic, but broken, conclusion even as her “I pray god it’s our last” is still sort of echoing. Maybe it was, or maybe it wasn’t.

Rhian: That’s one of my favourite aspects of the song – what did happen to this couple, in the end? Does she come and pick him up from the drunk tank and bail him out after the song’s close, or has she OD’d years previously, or is she happily settled in her own life now? And yes, it nicely dodges the expected stand-by-your-man stuff. Actually it’s very even-handed in the way they both berate each other, sounding equally foul-mouthed and irritable, presumably he’s got his drinking and she’s got her junk so they’re both in the grip of addiction – again it subverts the idea of the meek and submissive female innocent under the grubby domineering male thumb.

Miranda: I also like the way it takes the folk figure of the lonely drunkard singing about his old flame and brings her directly into the song to talk back.

Rhian: Yes, totally – she’s one of the old ballads’ idealised nebulous foils, who suddenly clears her throat and interrupts the narrative with her side of the story – making both of them more well-rounded characters by doing so.

Cheap, Lousy and… Haggard?

For the Top of the Pops appearance, the BBC insisted that MacColl’s singing of “arse” be replaced with the less offensive “ass”, although as she mimed the word MacColl slapped the relevant part of her body to make it clear what was meant… On December 18, 2007, BBC Radio 1 put a ban on the words “faggot” and “slut” from “Fairytale of New York” to “avoid offence”.

– Wikipedia

Rhian: Re: ‘faggot’, which admittedly I always found slightly incongruous in context, Wikipedia also sez: In his Christmas podcast, musical comedian Mitch Benn commented that “faggot” was Irish and Liverpudlian slang for a lazy person, and was unrelated to the derogatory term for homosexuals.) Also, the one word that never seems to get dubbed out is ‘punk’, despite its historical application to female prostitutes, rent-boys and prison ‘bitches’…

Miranda:And I think it’s not impossible they weren’t aware of that given that the folk canon – which the MacColl family were well into – does contain dances several hundred years old with titles like “the punk’s delight”.

Rhian: The use of ‘punk’ and ‘faggot’ – while the latter may not be used in its modern, derogatory sense, I think it undeniably carries those connotations – makes for, in terms of stereotyping, an odd kind of feminisation (that may be the wrong word, it’s been a long week) of the male protagonist. Shane Macgowan has referenced male prostitution as part of a generally chaotic/hustling lifestyle in songs like ‘The Old Main Drag’; I wonder if a similar thing is being implied here.

Miranda: I’d never considered that – but it’s Kirsty who says “punk”, isn’t it. I think it has a more general usage which is a bit like “bum”, but I like the choice of word because it doesn’t immediately imply that the only one who might have engaged in that lifestyle is automatically the woman, which a first listening of “old slut on junk” connotates.

Cars Big As Bars

Rhian: And, to be wanky, in terms of socio-political context: both MacColl and the Pogues were outspokenly left-wing. In 1987 Thatcher had just been reelected, the mass civil unrest, strikes and riots of the early 1980s had simmered down despite increasing wealth disparity and ostentatious display by those at the top of the pile, both here and in the US under Reagan. In the UK this is the era of Enfield as Loadsamoney, in New York of American Psycho and Wall Street (the latter film released the same year as this song). MacColl’s opening lines (‘They got cars big as bars, they got rivers of gold / But the wind blows right through you…’) concisely and incisively sums up the period’s glaring inconsistencies, setting the scene without allowing it to colour the rest of the song – except inasmuch as the protagonists seem likely to be nearer the bottom of the heap than the top, relying on each other with little material resources to fall back on.

You Promised Me Broadway

Miranda: So what about all these covers? Do any of them cut the mustard, or do anything that makes them worth a listen? The Ronan Keating/Maire Brennan one, I just … WHYYYY. Bowdlerised out of all hell.

Rhian: It’s been covered into cliche, and yet I can’t think of any that did anything memorable with it, or did anything other than diminish the power and energy of the original, especially with the bowing to bowdlerisation in a version like the Ronan one. It’s hard to see how it could be covered in a way that did anything other than replicate it.

Miranda: That whole Ronan recording is like some terrible Irish tourist board pantomime. The only thing worse would be Michael Flatley doing an interpretive dance version. She leaves “arse” in, and I thought it’d be like hearing the queen fart or something, but somehow it’s disappointing. She sounds like she’s still singing about the wild green mystical castle of Ireland and wee-diddly-dee in that totally Clannady way all the same.

Rhian:The number and variety of covers (including Florence Welch and Billy Bragg, wtf?) says something for the original’s quality and ‘classic’ status, but yeah, little else I can get out of it other than varying degrees of squeamishness over the language. It’s become a very safe standard though repeated covering, I think, especially with the lyrical sting drawn. I’ve just run across Dustin Kensrue’s version, which is entirely sung from the perspective of Macgowan’s character, with rewritten second and third verses, and in my opinion loses a lot for it:

Miranda:Gosh, it does, doesn’t it? Actually, this IS, this BECOMES the archetypal Lonely Drunk Folk Song I was talking about, doesn’t it? If you write Kirsty out like that, and reduce her lines to quotes (“You said so could anyone”) … she goes back in her box, really, doesn’t she. Turns back into a ghost woman, a memory of Archetypal Irish Drunk Regretful Bloke’s past. She becomes the stereotype again.That’s really interesting, because it highlights how important she is in terms of the song’s power, though. So Dustin is to be thanked for that, at least.

So, next time you hear this in the shopping centre, I don’t know, think about some of that stuff, instead of “oh God, this is overplayed”. And don’t overdo it. No BadRep reader needs to end up in the drunk tank this week, okay? Be good.

I have no idea how that happened so fast, but either way you can’t now enter the local shopping centre without being bombarded by Now That’s What I Call The Best Xmas… Ever! (Vol.64). In honour of the season, I thought, time allowing, that I’d do some little case studies on some of the songs currently assaulting your ears as you shop. You may hate all Christmas music, or you may love it – personally I’ve never minded it much – but pop singles are like miniature time capsules, so examining their gender politics, and what happens to these when new artists cover them, is one way to divert your brain into a state of broad feminist contemplation rather than all-out anti-consumerist rage in the queue at HMV¹.

Um. I said contemplation. But I can’t guarantee that every vid embedded in this series I’m proposing won’t have you reaching for a pretty stiff drink.

Been an Awful Good Girl

Anyway! Cast your mind, readers, back to the postwar baby boom – specifically 1953. Elizabeth II ascends the throne here in the UK! Everest is climbed and DNA discovered! And the volume of the Kinsey Reports titled Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, an attempt to research women’s sexual appetites and desires, is published to great controversy and brouhaha. And in December, this guy called Hugh Hefner launches some magazine or other and sells over 54,000 copies. The cultural melting pot for the sexual revolution of the Sixties is neatly bubbling away.

Christmas novelty smash hits have become a Thing since the War – White Christmas came out in 1942. And into this arena slinks Santa Baby, recorded by Eartha Kitt and penned by Joan Javits (a Republican Senator’s niece). It sashays onto the airwaves with a ba-boom-ba-boom of barbershoppy backing vocals, tongue shoved firmly in its cheek.

These days it’s been heard so often and covered enough times that people seem to have forgotten that it’s witty, that it actually stands out as distinct from more earnest fare like White Christmas. White Christmas is about a generation of people longing for their loved ones during the War. It dreams of idyllic peacetime Christmases. Santa Baby, on the other hand, is a playful and sly kick in the tender area for rising peacetime consumerism, as well as a tale of a trophy wife who always wants more stuff, from yachts to platinum mines to rings (not on the phone). In 1954 Eartha re-recorded a version called This Year’s Santa Baby, the lyrics of which reveal that the yacht wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and our heroine still isn’t satisfied.

Come And Trim My Christmas Tree / With Erotic Capital From Tiffany

For the feminists in the queue at HMV, especially those being subjected to the Pussycat Dolls version, this is naturally not unproblematic, not least because the kind of woman the song portrays appears to be exactly what Catherine Hakim, in her book Honey Money, wants women to aspire to be like. Without any tongue in cheek about it. And Honey Money only came out this year, despite the fact that it appears to be the product of what happens when you take Eartha Kitt completely literally. The gold digger the song portrays is a popular stereotype, and the song’s contemporary with the postwar rise in popularity of the “male breadwinner” family model, which wasn’t economically feasible across all social classes. More generally, of course, it’s a riff on a whole social trope around women’s bodies and feminine sexual allure as a source of transactional power.

I think for a lot of people, being exposed to the versions Kylie, the ‘Dolls et al have come out with has somehow managed to dampen our sense of the irony within the original – which makes more sense within the context of more ‘wholesome’ Fifties Christmas music, which it does snerk at, and class politics of the time – perhaps because newer versions are contemporary with many songs that aren’t particularly ironic in their appreciation of Worldly Stuff?

Shame, really, because Eartha had this sending up the golddigger stereotype thing pretty down. Check out her recording of Old Fashioned Millionaire, which is similar to Santa Baby but ever so slightly more acerbic, ably sending up cliches of postwar consumerism, patronising Empire-era South Pacific-style racism (which as a mixed race performer she was certainly no stranger to) and middle class pretensions around social properness and upward mobility with lines like “I want an old fashioned house with an old fashioned fence / and an old fashioned millionaire” and “I like Chopin and Bizet / and the songs of yesterday / String quartets and Polynesian carols / But the music that excels / is the sound of oil wells / as they slurp-slurp-slurp into the barrels…”

Some Very Different Covers

There are a lot of other covers of the song out there, like the bratty pop-punk stylings of the Dollyrots – Wikipedia lists loads. Most notable for me, in very different ways, are these two.

RuPaul’s 1997 cover takes precisely no prisoners, announcing “Been an awful good queen”, and adding in caustic asides like “Now honey, Miss RuPaul has been so good, it just hurts, and now I want you to reciprocate… by givin’ me a few ITEMS, you know…” and the wink-nudge reply to “come and trim my Christmas tree…” of “Honey, you ain’t trimmin’ nothin’.”

Surely after that glorious effort there was nowhere else the song could really go, right?

Wrong!

Santa Buddy

From the sublime, dear readers, to the ever so slightly ridiculous.

For lo, Santa Baby has just this year been covered again by – wait for it – Michael Bublé, god-emperor of bland, whose official site bio at the time of writing boasted frankly awesomely reality-disconnected statements like “his essence remains solid as a rock”, and “like Elvis”. But let’s not stare into that particular abyss too long – back to Santa Baby, for which Bublé’s version has completely rewritten the lyrics to recast the entire song as being about… um… a straight dude who likes presents.

That’s it.

No erotic funny business round here; Michael’s after CARS and FOOTBALL TICKETS and he’s going to MAKE PLATONIC MANLY BRO-FRIENDS with Santa until he gets them. Clearing all that flirting out the way – presumably to make room for all the “decorations bought from … Mercedes”, because I have NO idea how you hang a car bonnet on a Christmas tree, after all – he cracks out “Santa, buddy” at one point, and makes sure to stipulate that the convertible needs to be “steel blue”, since presumably “light blue” wasn’t quite macho enough. Though I’m not sure it really works, it’s fascinating – and the complete opposite of what RuPaul does with it. He even throws in a fastidiously heteromanly “I’ll wait up for you, dude“, to avoid looking too camp.

Of course, in this, as with nearly everything else Michael Bublé attempts to accomplish that isn’t looking like every photo of him would be marvellously improved by the addition of hungry velociraptors, he fails hilariously.

Mind you, to be fair to Michael, for every alteration he makes to keep the conversation with Santa strictly platonic – “Santa pally” (?!) – he also adds in “been a sweetie all year” rather than Eartha Kitt’s original “been an angel”, and where Eartha has “think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed”, Michael’s got “hotties”, which is pretty gender neutral, the writers clearly being aware that in the marketing niche he belongs in, squarely between Ronan Keating and Will Young, for every five straight middle aged women buying his records, there’s also a pretty significant gay following – he mentioned it himself with some enthusiasm in an interview.

And really, for all the “women like jewellery and men like… CARS” binary implications in there… there’s something about the way he goes “forgot to mention one little thing / cha-ching!” that just isn’t really all that macho after all. It’s almost rather sweet. Or maybe I’ve been looking at all those images of him being stalked by raptors just a bit too much and started feeling sorry for him.

It only seems right to end such a string of different treatments of a song about femininity and consumerism with the ultimate scion of both: Miss Piggy. I truly believe that she is perhaps the only one who’s almost on a par with Eartha herself. Think of all the froggies she hasn’t kissed!

Enjoy your Christmas shopping as far as possible. I’m contemplating tackling Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses next. AREN’T YOU EXCITED. I BET YOU CANNOT WAIT.

1. NB: for the record I’m inclined to think said rage quite justified, but at the same time, you probably can’t afford a criminal damages bill in these pressing times of recession and tinsel.