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"However there is one Christmas song that with every fiber of my being,"
"for as long as I can remember I have hated."
"And that is: 'We'll be having a wonderful Christmastime, We'll be having a wonderful Christmastime."
Christmas songs are contentious.
Some love their Yuletide trappings and their annual arrival fills them with joy.
Some are less thrilled.
There is very much a cultural divide between the two camps.
Those in retail this time of year are bludgeoned with the same 40 or so holiday standards.
This amorphous blob of jingling bells and icy synths that revolve
around slight lyrical variations about Christmas or Santa.
There are some definite classics that can endure recurring listens
but then there are others that bring with them a sense of dread.
But why do certain Christmas songs annoy us more than others
and what makes Paul McCartney's 'Wonderful Christmastime' the worst offender?
First we need to work out which Christmas songs are the most enduring.
To sort the ones people don't mind hearing a hundred times
versus the ones that send people plunging into a psychotic abyss.
Thankfully last year filmmaker Edgar Wright surveyed his Twitter followers
with this exact question.
By compiling the results there were two lists: a collection of loved and hated Christmas songs.
I also combined these rankings with six best and six worst Christmas song lists
The results are as follows:
These are all classics in the conventional sense.
The only song I wasn't sure of was "Christmas Wrapping"
and giving it listen made me realize I've heard it countless times.
There's a reason why the same songs are played every year,
why you always hear 'Last Christmas', 'Fairy Tale of New York' and the Phil Spector songs.
We like, or at least, are put at ease by the familiar.
Psychological science into the way the brain processes music
has shown that the more we hear something, the more we end up liking it
This is called the mere-exposure effect.
The idea that if you've been exposed to something you're more likely to like it
than something completely unknown.
If we playlisted a brand new roster of holiday staples,
the immediate reaction will be, 'What is this shit?'
As much as we complain about the same traditional holiday classics being
played every year no one wants to hear new stuff.
This is a big reason why there hasn't been a universally acknowledged entry into the Christmas canon
since 1994's 'All I Want for Christmas is You.'
But there is a tipping point within the effect.
While the more you listen to a song will increase the enjoyment to a point
after a set number of listens the opposite becomes true.
The more you over listen to a song the more bored and bothered the song will make you.
As a lot of Christmas music is made of similar parts, of sleigh bells, xylophone and synths
this sound will generally become more and more annoying
and because Christmas music is played on a constant loop all through December,
Christmas music aversion does increase, especially for those that work in retail.
Those that are employed by the store are much more likely to reach this psychological wall
and develop symptoms of low mood, irritation and fatigue.
But the retail industry isn't gonna stop anytime soon.
An oft-quoted study found that retail stores with Christmas music piped in
are much more likely to shift product.
The music having the psychological effect to make consumers want to consume more.
Furthermore a different report from 2011 suggests that slower paced music
will make shoppers spend more time in the store
and therefore buy more.
Whereas faster paced music has the opposite effect.
As such in store playlists are slanted towards slower Christmas songs.
If we compare the two lists the best Christmas songs on average have higher beats per minutes.
'Wonderful Christmastime' however has a lower BPM of 95,
therefore making it more likely to be overused in festive store playlisting.
Simply puts on your average December shopping trip
you are much more likely to hear 'Wonderful Christmastime'
so it is much more likely to be overplayed and worn out in your mind.
While overexposure is one way to tire of a song,
the complexity of the song itself goes a long way to explain
why certain songs are more likely to annoy sooner.
Dr Bonshor of the University of Sheffield states:
Admittedly my music theory is trash but let's compare the complexity of 'All I Want for Christmas is You'
with 'Wonderful Christmastime.'
First the lyrics.
When we feed both sets through a repetition detector we get the following results
with the orange highlighting showing closer repetitions and green showing distant repetitions.
'All I Want for Christmas is You' has a variety of repeated hooks.
the verses start with variations of the title, as does the final line of the chorus.
Most importantly they are altered in context with different spins on the lyrics.
This mix of familiar and different adds to the overall complexity of the song.
However 'Wonderful Christmastime' repeats the chorus line 14 times without variation.
The structures themselves showed the songs' relative complexities.
'Wonderful Christmastime' has mostly revealed the majority of its hooks and secrets within its first minute,
while 'All I Want for Christmas is You' has a dramatic opening, bridge
and final chorus key change to keep things interesting.
Given this it is no wonder people get quickly sick of 'Wonderful Christmastime.'
It all comes down to this:
Paul McCartney is the guy who wrote 'Yesterday'.
He should know better than to release this Christmas disaster
but then again, he wrote 'Yesterday'. Surely he can be excused?
Due to bad business decisions in the late 1970's and generally being fucked over,
Paul McCartney no longer had the publishing rights to his back catalogue of Beatles songs
and was not earning on the commercial use of all those classic songs he had written in 1960s.
While his solo material and stuff with Wings was popular, it never reached the heights of the Beatles.
It seems 'Wonderful Christmastime' was written as a yearly paycheck
and one that, due to him writing, producing and performing all the instrumentation on the track,
he receives a hundred percent of the back end.
Forbes magazine in 2010 estimated that McCartney makes $40,000 per year
just off his Yuletide embarrassment.
Let's look at in another way.
While it is bottom tier McCartney,
my combined best Christmas song list still put it at number 17.
As much as all of this is pointed to why people might hate 'Wonderful Christmastime'
some people still enjoy it.
That's the thing, you may hate Christmas songs.
You may hate Mariah Carey and all my other projected best Christmas songs.
People's relationships with songs don't begin and end with oversaturation, structure,
tempo and historical context.
Victoria Williamson PhD at Goldsmiths London University states that:
If we are stressed then we link bad feelings to the songs,
whereas if the songs can be mentally linked with the warmer relaxed family side of the season
then Christmas songs won't have such a negative effect.
It really depends on a multitude of things.
People might just hate 'Wonderful Christmastime' because it's a discordant earsore.
People might hate Mariah Carey's vocalizing
or the infinite covers of the 'Last Christmas.'
See, Christmas songs are contentious.
Some love them. Some hate them.
Either way this December, make sure you have your headphones.
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