Why Christmas music is not very metal

Christmas music is terrible. I only realized recently how much carols suck. And they've gotten away with so much, simply because we're all so used to hearing them. But if you manage to listen to them with a fresh perspective and reset your brain a little to erase all of those happy childhood memories associated with Bing Crosby I guarantee you that you will ruin your holiday just a little bit. That's what Mötley Mëdia is all about. Ruining everything.

I present to you the worst Christmas carol lyrics of all time, juxtaposed against heavy metal lyrics to highlight their awfulness.

"Hear them ring/Ding-a-ling"
--Silver Bells

What kind of moron wrote such a childlike onomatopoeia and managed to get it onto the radio every December for 60 years? I should be mad, but I'm almost sort of impressed. It's just so bad. No one says "ding-a-ling" in any context ever. How come we keep singing this fucking song?

Now, imagine if Metallica had tried to put this kind of shit into For Whom The Bell Tolls, which contains the amazingly cool lines, "Blackened roar, massive roar fills the crumbling sky/Shattered goal fills his soul with a ruthless cry."

Taking a cue from Silver Bells, however, we get, "Ding-a-ling, Ding-a-ling fills the crumbling sky/Ding-a-ling fills his soul with a ruthless cry."

Not even James Hetfield could have made that sound cool.

"Have a holly jolly Christmas/and in case you didn't hear/oh by golly have a holly jolly Christmas/This year."
--A Holly Jolly Christmas

There is so much wrong with this song, I don't even know where to start. Maybe I should just have you re-read those lyrics and really ponder just how dumb it all sounds. "Holly" is a noun, not an adjective. You can't have a "Holly Christmas." You could have a Christmas that was "Holly-full," as in, full of Holly, but your Christmas cannot be holly. Also, the interior rhyme in this song is just getting out of hand. I imagine songwriter Johnny Marks (Thanks, Wikipedia!) sitting at a piano babbling words that end in "-olly" and just scribbling lyrics like a moron. In addition to the ridiculous rhyming here, the song actually assumes you are not listening. "In case you didn't hear," it says. Thank you, I hadn't been listening to the song up until you said that and I almost missed the important message. This is particularly helpful for everyone who bought the single and may not have understood that it was a song about Holly Jolly Christmases.

Now imagine if Ratt had used similar tactics in writing their smash success, Round and Round. As is, the chorus goes, "Round and round/Well, love will find a way, just give it time/Round and Round/What comes around goes around"

However, imagine a Johnny Marks version of Ratt: "Round and round/Well, above the ground and underground too/All around/Pound for pound and making sounds/I bet you aren't listening."

It's horrific.

"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer/Had a very shiny nose/and if you ever saw it/you would even say it glowed."
--Rudolf The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

This has bothered me since I was a kid. Is his nose shiny or glowing? Those can be complete opposites. Is it shiny like metal? I'm imagining a shiny red Christmas ornament at this point. But wait, if I take a shiny red ornament into a dark place, it isn't going to glow, because "shiny" means that it reflects light and, in a place with no light, there's nothing to reflect so it isn't going to look special. So now I'm imagining a glowing sphere that has a light inside. And the light emanating from within the sphere negates whatever shiny quality is present on the sphere's surface. And the more I think the more pissed off I get. FUCK. This is so dumb. I just spent so much time thinking about an imaginary character and I could have been sleeping or something. And guess who wrote this fucking thing? Johnny Marks, the same genius who penned Holly Jolly Bullshit.

I imagine a Cannibal Corpse song written in this sort contradictory style. Let's just tack on some Johnny Marks to some lyrics from Meat Hook Sodomy. "Butchery, my meat hooks sharpened to penetrate/Emasculate, gouging crotches I will eat/No wait, I won't do that/That's actually quite gross/You would even say that sodomy is not what I will be doing with my meat hook."


/w\