All I Want for Christmas is You: Why we haven’t had a decent festive song since Mariah Carey in 1994
As the festive season draws near and Mariah Carey’s hit single returns to our playlists, music correspondent Roisin O'Connor thinks it's unlikely that any artist will achieve similar success with something new
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One of the best moments on American Idol in 2014 was an exchange between judges Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey, who famously did not get on during the series.
As a contestant/Mariah stan ["stalker fan"] told the star he loved “All I Want for Christmas is You" and hailed it as the “best modern-day Christmas song”, Minaj threw a little shade by saying: “It sure was, wasn’t it?”, emphasis on the "was" very much intended.
Carey’s response was immediate and dismissive: “Still is, dahling!”
An office Christmas party stalwart; “All I Want for Christmas is You” is, indeed, still considered one of the best festive songs of all time 24 years after its release, with only a few artists attempting to emulate its success – failing every time. Academic studies have crowned it the best festive song.
Carey earns a reported £4000,000 in royalties from the track each year. Not even pop megastars such as Justin Bieber, Coldplay or Beyonce have succeeded – so much that out of 17 of the Christmas songs which currently feature in the UK top 40, just two are original releases from the last 20 years.
Carey herself has tried to “reinvent the wheel” by going back to the track in an attempt to improve it, with a new intro and then a 2011 duet with Bieber. But nothing beats the original. It’s so embedded in our Christmas mindset that it actually just hit a new peak on the US charts – making the Billboard Top 10 for the first time ever.
A few artists have tried original songs this year: Sia’s record “Everyday is Christmas” was probably the most convincing, although “Santa‘s Coming for Us” sounded like a threat. She crafted some sweet piano ballads – but even her effort received a relatively chilly reception.
“[There’s a] shortage of good Christmas music… It’s not like you have to have an original idea to begin with,” Sia told Zane Lowe. “It’s like, Christmas, mistletoe, ho-ho-ho, Santa Claus, Christmas list, elves.”
There are three kinds of Christmas songs: the traditional festive edition, kids’ favourites like “Frosty the Snowman” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, and seasonal love songs.
“Twenty years ago, Christmas music and Christmas albums by artists weren’t the big deal that they were today,” Walter Afansaieff, a frequent Carey collaborator during the Nineties, told Billboard in 2014. “Back then, you didn’t have a lot of artists with Christmas albums.
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”It wasn’t a known science at all back then, and there was nobody who did new, big Christmas songs. So we were going to release it as king of an everyday: ‘Hey, you know, we’re putting out a Christmas album. No big deal’.”
Only it was a big deal. Carey’s album Merry Christmas made it to No 3 on the Billboard Top 200 and had been certified triple platinum by the end of 1994. “All I Want for Christmas” was a grower and took a little longer to catch on. Then in 2003 it featured in Love Actually, which helped the song gain even more popularity, in a similar way to the success enjoyed by a 13-year-old Brenda Lee when her song “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” appeared in Home Alone.
Perhaps Sia unwittingly points out the biggest problem in how she dismisses the theme as unoriginal and limits what she had to go on when she began writing. Far too many attempts at modern Christmas songs try to hark back to a different era.
Modern audiences are far more suspicious, and are therefore mistrustful of those sickly, heartfelt ballads. “Fairytale of New York”, arguably Britain’s favourite Christmas song of all time, is actually the perfect combination of what audiences might want in a modern-day hit: combining traditional Irish folk instrumentation with a wonderfully bitter tone as Shane MacGowan battles it out with Kirsty MacColl.
”[New Christmas songs] feel calculated,“ Mitchell Kezin, director of a documentary about offbeat Christmas songs, told The Washington Post in 2014. “They’re referencing those familiar tropes and all those cliches, and they’re grasping at the kind of songwriting that no longer exists.”
Radio 1’s Official Chart show host Greg James, who will reveal the UK Christmas No 1 on Friday, told the BBC: “We’re a nostalgic nation. We watch re-runs of old TV shows. We like traditions and Christmas songs are part of that. We only listen to them once a year.”
At the same time, holidays such as Christmas are inherently nostalgic affairs, so it’s hard to imagine a thumping pop beat running through a track about Snapchatting your girlfriend on Christmas Eve. Will we ever have a Christmas song that matches the level of success as Carey’s hit? And in an era when Christmas cheer, however sincere, is usually derided as cheesy? It seems unlikely.
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