On Christmas Carols 1/2
By Timothy Snyder
The other day I experienced the inhuman assault on Christmas.
I was in a cafe, trying to work, counting on the familiar harmony of conversation and music.
But something was wrong. No one was talking, perhaps because the music was eerie. Since I was trying to focus, I didn’t immediately notice the problem. I just kept experiencing an irritation that kept me from concentrating on the paper in front of me.
And so I lifted my head from my notebook and listened. And was disturbed.
What seemed at first to be winter songs and Christmas carols were something else. The melodies were more or less correct — recognizable as “Silent Night,” “The First Noël,” “Winter Wonderland.” But the voice was generically earnest, a bland baritone bellowing, straining, I felt, from nowhere to nowhere.
And the lyrics were wrong. Not just mistaken here or there, but wrong in a sort of patterned way. All of the specific references to the nativity were expunged, replaced with metaphysical blather (”oh and that sacred star… that sacred star!”).
And the human parts had gone missing as well. In “Winter Wonderland,” which is a love song, we should hear this nice couplet about a pair taking a walk:
In the meadow, we can build a snowman
And pretend that he is Parson Brown
In the song as I heard it in the café, that lyric became:
In the meadow we can find a snowman
And pretend that he is a nice old guy
That was then followed by some meaningless verbiage about dancing the night away, where “guy” is lamely rhymed with the sun being high. Again, the actual song:
In the meadow, we can build a snowman
And pretend that he is Parson Brown
He’ll say, “Are you married?” We’ll say, “No man,
But you can do the job when you’re in town.”
In these four lines we hear so much. The young couple are doing something together, and telling a story to each other about what they are doing. Parson Brown, inside the fantasy world we share, is a specific person with attributes, which we imagine by reference to the snowman. Their attitude to him is playful yet respectful. The lovers are not yet married but they want to be. They are outside the rules for the moment, acting out their love in public, but they understand the conventions and want to join them. The layers in these lines descend gently upon the listener, like snowfall in sunlight.
My mind was awaiting all that; the vacuum of “nice old guy” strained the neurons, or the soul.
I first heard “Winter Wonderland” about forty years after Richard Bernhard Smith died in 1935; fifty more years have passed since then. Behind that lyric is an actual man, inspired by snowfall in a park, who no doubt knew something about romance; a young man ill with tuberculosis, who would die months after writing the lyric; and then the song lives after him, preserving his own playful sense of how we might be together, passed on from those who sing to those who listen.
The art lives until it is killed. What, in this case, is killing the song? Killing Christmas? Killing civilization? It is a set of algorithms that we flatteringly call AI, or artificial intelligence. My guess would be that someone, somewhere, entered an instruction to generate winter and Christmas songs that avoided “controversial” subjects such as divine and human love. And so we get mush. In a reverse sublimation, the sacred becomes slop.
In our politics, we have the idea that Christmas has somehow been sullied by all the foreigners. But who are the true aliens in this Christmas story? The non-human entities. The example of the tortured winter song is just one of many. Basic cultural forms are weakened under the assault of algorithms designed to monopolize attention: classroom teaching; sharing of food, simple conversation; holiday ritual. Music.
People, of course, make money on this. A few people make a lot of money. And, in some notable cases. they are the very people who tell us that foreigners are destroying our civilization, are taking Christmas away from us, and all the rest. The people who profit from the culture-wrecking machines blame other people, who have nothing to do with it. And meanwhile those who actually sing the songs have trouble finding listeners.
“Winter Wonderland” is a light bit of music, with a subtle message about romance, one that requires some patience and some experience and a sense of humor. Any references there might be to the holiday itself are indirect and playful: the imaginary parson with the melting reproof, the wandering unmarried couple.
“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.” The carols bear a message about love, one that that no machine will understand, and that those who profit from the machine perhaps do not want us to understand. Love begins humbly, takes risks, recognizes the other, ends in pain, returns as song. And begins humbly again.
Source: Substack
