Lay down all thought, surrender to THE HOLIDAY SPIRIT!

The other day I was at Chili's with my mom and my little brother. I was zoning out for a minute and over the speaker system I heard a faint sound of bird calls and drum beats. After a second I realized I was hearing the intro to "Tomorrow Never Knows" by The Beatles.

My first reaction: That's odd—I've never even heard this song on the radio. much less in a restaurant.

My second reaction: GREAT GREASY FUCK SOMEBODY IS SINGING "JINGLE BELLS" TO THE TUNE OF THIS SONG.

So begins something I'll try to do on my blog for the next month or so—point out dumb attempts to create new and novel Christmas tunes. I will post about stuff as I hear it. It's not that I don't like Christmas music (I don't), it's just that it gets even worse when musicians make limp efforts to rejuvenate it.

I searched around and found that this version of "Jingle Bells" appears on a Christmas album by The Fab Four, a "Beatles tribute band."

First, this doesn't work rhythmically. Second, it's just dumb to make "Jingle Bells" try to sound mystical, especially in a song whose original lyrics come from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Sorry, Bing Crosby or whoever the fuck the first person was who sang "Jingle Bells."

So, what I'm saying is, in a musical genre where no one's totally original anyway, these guys are double-lazy for melding Beatles songs with traditional Christmas songs. That makes them ethically and musically worse than the fucking Monkees, even though I gather they play their own instruments pretty well. And their web site sucks. And I'd like to say: Fuck you, you bunch of huckster morphodite fucks. If you want to do something good with the legacy of a good band, go fucking start your own.

And the cute little suits and moptops are dumb. That's why the real Beatles stopped wearing them before they did all their good albums.