In My Changer, 12/8/02

It's definitely the holiday season, because yesterday I completed the bulk of what I expect to be my winter holiday gift shopping. (This completion contingent on a couple other known quantities being picked up at inconvenient stores and subject to revision upon being presented with gifts by parties with whom I had not expected to exchange presents to commemorate the winter holiday complex.)

During this shopping, I heard several hundred nauseating renditions of "holiday classics," those chestnuts roasting on the open fires of my hatred that should be buried deep in the frosty snow on a white Christmas so that the thought that Santa Claus is coming to town does not send me into sputtering paroxysms of incoherent anger. Fa la la la la la la indeed. At Borders, the requisite recording of such music was played that little bit too loud, that last little bit that pounds it insistently into your consciousness, and I found myself saying "This music is horrible!" at random intervals, purely involuntarily.

However, as much as I dislike Christmas songs, I feel a deep, lower-frequency resonance with Christmas hymns, even in my present atheism. And when it comes to Christmas hymns (and Christmas sacred music), the older and more German, the better. That's why

Michael Praetorius

Mass for Christmas Morning (McCreesh reconstruction)

Gabrieli Consort, cond. Paul McCreesh

Deutsche Grammophon Archiv

and

Johann Sebastian Bach

Christmas Oratorio

Montiverdi Choir/English Baroque Soloists, cond. John Eliot Gardiner

Deutsche Grammophon Archiv

are never far from my changer in December. In fact, both are in there now, and the opening chorus from the Christmas Oratorio is currently rousing me to another few minutes of typing before I go to bed. I find it hard to explain the hold this music has on me. I grew up with Christmas hymns on the stereo for much of my childhood, but this music in particular feels as if it has become part of me.

The Gabrieli Consort disc has the added benefit, for me, of a couple Martin Luther hymns in rousing settings. I feel Martin Luther's hymns in my bones—I feel something in me resolve and raise itself, a mental condition manifest in a weird indefinable physical feeling—which is probably only explainable by the kind of mystic across-the-centuries reasoning I normally deprecate with glee. (For those who don't know, I am a direct descendant of one of Martin Luther's mother's brothers.) I feel an instinct away from atheism when I listen to Luther's hymns, precisely because the connection it makes with me is something I flat-out can't account for.

I have a good recording of

Georg Frederic Handel

Messiah

Arleen Auger, sop; Anne Sofie von Otter, alt; Michael Chance, countertenor; Howard Crook, tenor; John Tomlinson, bass

English Concert and Choir, cond. Trevor Pinnock

Deutsche Grammophon Archiv

but it has never moved me in the same way as the music above, perhaps because it is not German enough and way too popular to be "mine" in the way the other music is. It'll be in the changer soon enough anyway, I'm sure.

On the hip-hop side, I've been enjoying again

Biz Markie

The Best of Cold Chillin

Cold Chillin

or, more specifically, "One Two," "Pickin Boogers," "Vapors," and "Just a Friend," which are by far the four best songs on that CD. And two of those ("Pickin Boogers" and "Vapors") were ghostwritten by Big Daddy Kane, whose duet "Just Rhymin' with Biz" I have also been enjoying on

Big Daddy Kane

The Very Best of...

Rhino

"Well, it's the Kane in the flesh/Of course I'm fresh!/Oh, you thought that I was rotten/Well, I beg your pardon"... Lines that have been, ahem, generously sampled by later artists. But nothing can quite match the casual storytelling of "Vapors," which really is better rapped by Biz Markie than it would have been by Kane, over a Marley Marl sample from "Papa Don't Take No Mess." The Biz's amused detachment is something Kane never really mastered, and the amused detachment is exactly what makes this song so fun to listen to, as various parties who dissed members of Biz's posse change their tune as said posse is well remunerated for its successful effort at making Biz famous.

This is the closest "Vapors" comes to triumphalism: "Offered him a job, but now he don't want it/Damn it feels good to see people up on it!/Cause I remember when at first they wasn't/Now guess what they caught from my cousin?/The vapors." Big Daddy would have savored that and rolled it into the other descriptions, gotten too vicious for his precarious rhetorical position of I-told-you-so success story; in Biz's rendition, it's a momentary smile in these so-funny-it's-pathetic vignettes. Biz rules. Don't ever talk to a girl who says she just has a friend. Peace.

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