Day 5: Mariah Carey – Merry Christmas

So this is interesting. I figured it would happen eventually, but I realized at some point today that I really fell for that Helio Sequence album. Take yesterday morning for example: I slept to it, as project protocol dictates, and had to practically pry it out of my ears when it came time to randomly selecting another album the next morning, which ended up being Broken Bells.

I’m aware that probably is a big part of the vitriol that Broken Bells inspired in me. With Helio Sequence I finally really fell for something that I came across.

But this is really important: this effect has really engaged the part of my music habits that this whole project was meant to penetrate. If not for the parameters I’ve laid out for myself, I would still be listening to Keep Your Eyes Ahead today, and tomorrow, and probably for a week after, eventually tiring of it at some point and shelving it only to retrieve it rarely if at all.

And so what I’m dealing with (probably) yesterday and (definitely) today is akin to withdrawals. Listening to Broken Bells yesterday was tough (largely because I was on holiday with a group of good friends and didn’t want to sit there with one earphone in all day), and listening to Mariah Carey today was tough in much the same way. I actually thought about making them listen to it with me until I divined from their facial expressions that I must have some freakish genetic mutation that prevents me from punching holes in the walls around me when this music comes on.

It’s really not bad music. I guess.

I’ve listened to it a fair amount already today (~4-5 full repeats) and will be until I wake up in the morning. My initial feeling was that they could have used this album to coax Noriega out of the embassy. The tracks are hugely produced and utterly tower over the versions I remember hearing as a child. O Holy Night especially; that track is particularly exquisite (the part at 2:50 giving me damn chills every time I hear it) and stands out as probably the only one I think I’d enjoy hearing after this is all over.

My family stopped celebrating Christmas in a traditional sense when I was on the cusp of teen-age. By my family I mean it was just my mom and me. I think the eventual Santa debunking and a lack of any obligatory-annual-visit-type grandparents to appease can really take the shine off the chestnut, so to speak. I grew up devoid of any semblance of Christmas spirit and to this day can barely muster an ounce of enthusiasm about it. I do remember singing a lot of these classics in school choir, but sweet baby Jesus do I ever not remember liking any of them at all.

The production on the album is We Are The World-scale studio magic: Booming, metronomic drums buried at the edge of inaudibility in the mix, fat bright bass, a full gospel choir, a Liberace understudy tickling ivories, someone with a synth keyboard set on String Section. This album was made roughly at the apex of Mariah Carey’s pre-tragic era, and evinces a formidable budget and the unwavering catering-to of an artist with enormous talent and clout. Each song has what sounds like a cast of thousands, who take the song and turn all its knobs fully clockwise — except the ‘irony’ knob, which gets rolled all the way down to zero. Mariah’s singing is, well, what I expected. She sings like every bar of every song is the only shot she’ll ever get at convincing you that baby Jesus is the reason the world is beautiful. Some people I read excerpted in the critical reception section of this album’s Wiki article complained about her oversinging, but I’m not really sure why that registers as a valid critique in anyone’s mind. Joe Satriani is still fucking touring. Thomas Kinkade sells millions of prints of his fucking paintings. If you don’t like gaudy over-reaching art, fine, but that’s not really the artist’s fault.

In the Wiki article, there’s a brief section about an upcoming musical production based on this album. It contains the pretty much perfect line, “Her character uses song and love to keep the Christmas spirit alive.” Yes, that’s exactly right. As much as I wanted to come into this album as a jaded  asshole and dismiss it as what it appears to be — trite, manipulative shlock — the problem is it’s really not. As much as I can see people wanting to put on a Bill Cosby sweater and enjoying it ironically or something, I just can’t help but take it seriously. In writing this post so far I’ve gone through a bunch more listens to a couple of the songs I like the most, and it’s really cementing itself in my brain.

So yes, I honestly like this. I doubt I would find myself wanting to listen to almost ever in the future, but some music just isn’t like that. This album is the fine china your grandma wills to you, which you don’t appreciate because you’re lazy and usually just use paper plates, until one night when your new fiancee’s parents come over for dinner and you suddenly realize you have a use for it. Then you bust out that china, borrow some linen napkins from your mom, and stop by Wal-Mart to pick up this CD.