The only original track on Rod Stewart's best-selling Christmas album. Rod recorded a whole Christmas special in Scotland's epic Stirling Castle. The normal rules for taste usually go out the window during the holiday season. This is one time of year that Rod "The Mod" Stewart's red-and-green tartan suits are distinctly appropriate.
Grade: B+
Best YouTube Comment: "I'll bet this is an original song, I doubt anyone else sang this! Refreshing love the remakes, just nice when there is a song I don't know about the holiday, Rod you are smooth as always!" — MusikLover8
Since John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John's inexplicable slice of Yuletide-flavored nonsense was officially disqualified as one of the worst Christmas songs of the last decade per our draconian awfulness-criteria, we'll consider it here. And, so, yeah. This would give Rudolph nose cancer, cause Santa to steer his sleigh into an active volcano during his gift-dropping run over Maui, and make the three wise men inject lethal amounts of freebased myrrh into their eyeballs were any of them ever exposed to it. And what, exactly, might Olivia have bought John for Christmas? You want to say a new e-meter, but what you're really thinking is a book of massage coupons, because you are a bad person.
Every year, hordes of overly spirited musicians try to capture Christmas cheer in the studio. While there are some artists who can, in fact, create a respectable modern-day holiday tune, it’s safe to say that they’re few and far between.
Many holiday enthusiasts fail in attempts to cover songs from the Christmas canon, performing lackluster versions of songs such as the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “Christmastime Is Here” or “The Little Drummer Boy” for the millionth time. For the most part, these have nothing new to offer.
Others, knowing they can’t top Burl Ives or Brenda Lee, try to create their own original holiday songs. A select few of these brave souls actually do it right. Run-D.M.C.’s “Christmas in Hollis” and more recently some of Sufjan Stevens’s prolific holiday tidings provide two contemporary examples. Everyone else? Their efforts fall somewhere between getting coal in your stocking and Santa blowing out your eardrums.
Being the holiday sadists that we are, we decided to seek out the worst of the worst contemporary holiday originals. To do so, we used the following criteria:
It's December, which has historically meant three things for me: an aggressive holiday music binge; reminding my loved ones to say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," because there are still a few non-Christians in America; and prepping myself for the inevitable, comically PC "Happy Kwanzaa" comment from someone who is just trying so hard to do right.
With regard to holiday music, for better or worse, I have an opinion on everything. One of those opinions is that "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is an overrated song. It falls in the same category as "Jingle Bells" as being just a little too corny for my liking. With that said, there are two versions, by The Temptations and The Jackson 5, that have found ways to funk it up a bit, and for years these were the only two versions I could tolerate. Until this morning.
