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Advent Calendar - 14 - Paul McCartney - Wonderful Christmastime
Weirdly this beauty turns out to be my most controversial Christmas love. It seems there is quite a lot of hate for Macca’s joyous Xmas masterpiece. Having expressed my love of the song on the Galaxie 500 Mailing list in 2005 I have found myself having to fight my corner against a torrent of dislike for the song. But, for 18 years nothing has changed my opinion, and I think I actually may have won over a few people - although suspect they may consider their change of heart ironic.
The thing is, I genuinely don’t understand the negativity - I mean - it’s a Christmas song that celebrates all that’s good about the season - it has joy, it has choirs of children, it has friendship. It is also musically innovative, seeing Macca playing with his new electronic toys!
I’m, happily, not alone in my love of it, here are a few other folk celebrating it:
All of the songs telling us what Christmas is supposed to be, supposed to feel like, are just like all of the posts on Instagram that make us think our lives and bodies should look a certain way. We feel shitty by comparison. The moral of “Wonderful Christmastime” is that being you, right now, however you’re spending your holiday, is great and correct and just as Christmas as anyone else and their decked halls.
The Christmas in “Wonderful Christmastime” has no stakes. No stress.
Snakes and Sparklers (substack), 2020
The intense acrimony toward “Wonderful Christmastime” is somewhat of a head-scratcher. Sure, the song’s certainly not as emotional or epic as “Hey Jude,” “Yesterday” and “Live and Let Die.” (Though what is?) And, unlike other contemporary McCartney solo songs or his work with Wings, “Wonderful Christmastime” certainly shows its age. It sounds like a 1979 single, from the slightly foggy production to the soft-glow keyboards. Those are hardly fatal flaws, however — especially considering the song arrived in the same year as Wings’ “Back to the Egg,” a charmingly weird LP that touched on everything from glammy disco and low-lit funk to cheesy soul. And “Wonderful Christmastime” is as nakedly sentimental as anything McCartney wrote during the ’70s, a period when he churned out dozens of love songs for his beloved wife Linda.
Annie Zaleski - Salon, 2016
And that’s the paradox of this track — the friendly, human-sounding stuff is the work of precise, ruthless, calculation, while the inhuman, cold, machine-like stuff is made by someone giddy with the possibilities of his new toys and playing with them. That’s McCartney all over, really, and whether you like or dislike the record, I’d argue that “Wonderful Christmastime” is, if nothing else, the quintessential Paul McCartney record; the one I’d play people who wanted to learn everything about the full range of Paul McCartney’s music in three minutes and forty-five seconds.
Head of State, 2016
Everything's swirling / last build: 2024-04-03 11:39