Douchebag of the Week: Mr. Christmas Standard Cover Man

We cast a wide net with this week’s Douchebag award, but I felt ready to tackle an issue that must be addressed. This award is meant to cover a whole group of people for whom recognition is well past due and yet whom we only wish could be “unsung.”

This year, the airwaves, the gas stations, the malls and every other nook and cranny of our society reachable by radio have been drowned in a sea of Christmas standards, covered in the most objectionable ways by a host of musical miscreants. The soul singer warbling and yodeling through Nat King Cole’s Christmas Song, rendering it a meaningless, inaudible mess. The country singer trying to “Boot Scoot” through Carrol of the Bells. The sappy bubble-gum pop singer who thinks that four tracks of her whiny-ass voice abusing Jingle Bell Rock is a legitimate alternative to Bill Haley’s original. Its enough to make a music lover to want to deck the halls with balls of feces.

I’m not opposed to cover songs. I’m not opposed to remakes of Christmas tunes. I think both have their place, when they honor the original. And of course, I know that every year includes a few “updates” of old classics, to help people celebrate the season with voices they recognize. I get that.

But this year’s glut of reprehensible repertory is neither tribute nor celebration: it’s just the seepage of a corporate media that’s lost any sense of passion, joy or originality. It is uninspired and uninspiring pablum, tuned to what marketers and salesmen hope is a key that will elicit a Pavlovian compulsion to spend, spend, spend.

And it’s every-freakin’-where. It’s inescapable. I’ve tried. And it doesn’t make me want to spend, it makes me want to roast someone’s nuts over an open fire. It makes me want to run the responsible persons over in a one horse open sleigh. So, if you are one of the winners of this week’s award, do yourself a favour: if you should hear those sleigh bells ring-alin’, ding-ding, ding-alin’, do yourself a favour and get the hell out of the road.

Because somewhere at the root of all of it, there is some executive in a $1000 suit, furtively consulting his Blackberry, sipping a soy latte, flashing his million dollar smile at disinterested waitresses, chomping Viagra and making the decisions that will finally make Christmas as flaccid and ineffectual as his dick. Or maybe there’s more than one, who gives a shit? To him and to all of them, I proudly hand this week’s Douchebag of the Week award. Merry fucking Christmas, douchebag!