It’s that holiday time of year. The old familiar songs have been playing for a while already, in the stores, dedicated radio stations, streaming channels, and elsewhere. Every so often somebody will do a cover version of an old song that takes off, or more rarely someone will come up with something completely new. (Sometimes they can score from beyond the grave!) I’ve been playing trombone in a community orchestra for decades now, and every annual holiday concert always has several charts I’ve played before.
But there’s a disturbing new trend. Timothy Snyder has noticed The Inhuman Assault on Christmas.
...What seemed at first to be winter songs and Christmas carols were something else. The melodies were more or less correct -- recognizable as “Silent Night,” “The First Noël,” “Winter Wonderland.” But the voice was generically earnest, a bland baritone bellowing, straining, I felt, from nowhere to nowhere.
And the lyrics were wrong. Not just mistaken here or there, but wrong in a sort of patterned way. All of the specific references to the nativity were expunged, replaced with metaphysical blather (”oh and that sacred star... that sacred star!”).
What?
...The art lives until it is killed. What, in this case, is killing the song? Killing Christmas? Killing civilization? It is a set of algorithms that we flatteringly call AI, or artificial intelligence. My guess would be that someone, somewhere, entered an instruction to generate winter and Christmas songs that avoided “controversial” subjects such as divine and human love. And so we get mush. In a reverse sublimation, the sacred becomes slop.
In our politics, we have the idea that Christmas has somehow been sullied by all the foreigners. But who are the true aliens in this Christmas story? The non-human entities. The example of the tortured winter song is just one of many. Basic cultural forms are weakened under the assault of algorithms designed to monopolize attention: classroom teaching; sharing of food, simple conversation; holiday ritual. Music.
People, of course, make money on this. A few people make a lot of money. And, in some notable cases. they are the very people who tell us that foreigners are destroying our civilization, are taking Christmas away from us, and all the rest. The people who profit from the culture-wrecking machines blame other people, who have nothing to do with it. And meanwhile those who actually sing the songs have trouble finding listeners.
The thing about using A.I. here is that humans don’t actually need help creating soulless music. There has always been a market for auditory anesthesia. Muzak has been a profitable company for decades, providing soundscapes that are mostly mildly pleasant while not demanding active engagement on the listener’s part.
And let’s face it — the music industry has always been notorious for ripping off performers. (They say if you teach your children to love music and art, they’ll never have money for drugs.)
There are only so many Christmas songs, only so many ways to try to make them fresh. Mannheim Steamroller was a breath of fresh air (pun intended), bringing new life to old classics until they too became over-familiar from being played everywhere. Further, everyone has at least one holiday tune that drives them up the wall, while there are others that just seem to be something that makes the season feel right — and they’re different for every person.
So, if you are so inclined, post a comment about which holiday songs and artists are your favorites, which ones make you want to kick a reindeer, and which ones just don’t work for you.
I’m going to include this, one of my favorites, from Jonathan Coulton. It seems especially topical now, given what Snyder has commented on.
