And any song where they insist on pronouncing words wrong. Two words in particular are the biggest offenders, and O Holy Night has both in quick succession:
We are singing in English people. The word is pronounced “dih-vine”, not “dee-vine”. If you don’t want the schwa, sing in Latin.
The second syllable of “Angels” is unstressed and, again, IT’S A SCHWA! It’s “An-juls”, not “An-GELLS”
Regarding Wham! vs Streisand: Look, I get some of you are voting for Last Christmas because it’s Wham. And Last Christmas. But did you listen to that Streisand song? It’s awful. The only reason not to vote for it is that it arguably isn’t actually music.
And WTF is up with that Pentatonix song? I thought for sure Mariah Carey would walk away with the match, but then I listened to that Pentatonix atrocity. It sounds like they recorded them all separately (right up against the mics), autotuned them, and mixed them all together right down the middle. It’s a terrible song, but somebody worked really hard to make it even worse.
After taking off points for it sucking, I gave the Streisand song a few points for not being the SOS and for taking chances - trying to make it “jazz”. That’s not the case with Wham, which is just plain boring.
Thankfully there is the odd secular Xmas song that is actually good. It is hard to top John Lennon’s (or Sarah McLachlan’s cover of) So This is Christmas.
Point of Order: The Spice Girls version is a remake of the original by The Waitresses. All the others you say “various artists”… safe to assume that we are judging the overall song for Christmas Wrapping and not specifically the Spice Girls remake?
Uh, pretty sure that “angles” is a required component of a high school geometry curriculum. I used to teach it myself. (Not angels though… it was a public school.)
Oh, next year we should put Frank Sinatra’s Silent Night on the list.
It’s a great carol, sung by a great artist, so it SHOULD BE fantastic. But it’s hard to describe the suckitude if you haven’t actually heard it. And you may not have because it doesn’t get much air time. For a very good reason.
It is simultaneously way too fast AND way too slow, which is a difficult feat to accomplish but Old Blue Eyes proves here that anything is possible. Even making the world’s most treasured Christmas carol sung by one of the most popular singers in history truly awful.
I mean not quite War Is Over bad, but pretty darn bad.