I had this awful idea one day while working at a hotel and hearing the third distinct cover of “Santa Baby” I’d heard during the same shift. What if someone set about to create the worst Christmas playlist on purpose. The Krampusmix.

The idea was to have it be all the worst overplayed Christmas songs, in addition to more obscure awful Christmas songs.

And then I thought “what would happen if you took all the covers of Jingle Bell Rock and played them back to back, salt and pepper diner style, in order of increasing awfulness? What would happen if you did the same for Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Santa Baby, Last Christmas, My Favorite Things, and so on?”

So I started with Jingle Bell Rock. And learned a few things. First of all, I learned that there are a LOT of covers of this shitty song. I learned that a lot of covers replicate Chubby Checker’s “Jingle bell twist” flail at relevance. I learned that the bad falls into categories. There’s a vast swath of covers that I just called “Nissan Commercial” because you could tell that the track was produced with being picked up for a commercial in mind. Offensively inoffensive, even in the context of covers of Jingle Bell Rock. There’s a not insignificant number of covers that are sung phonetically by people who don’t speak English. The number of covers per year keeps increasing as people keep trying to get their cover played in commercials. There is exactly one tolerable version of this song. It was performed by George Strait.

I also learned that youtube is not the platform for something like this. When a playlist contains more than 100 entries, it bogs down horribly.

I then started adding up how long it would take to listen to just all the Jingle Bell Rock covers. It was at least 36 hours. Of nothing but Jingle Bell Rock. Playing this entire playlist at anyone might be a war crime. It was more or less at this point that I abandoned the project because I realized that I would have to listen to this whole damned thing. And possibly keep it updated. As the number of increasingly soulless cash grab covers increases exponentially. And I’d essentially only got halfway through one song.

I also learned of some seriously awful Christmas music. Shit you’ll never hear while working retail. Did you know that the Dallas Cowboys released two Christmas albums in the 80s? Their version of the Twelve Days of Christmas replaces “A Partridge in a Pear Tree” with “A new hat for Coach Landry.” And that’s the high point of both albums.

I once thought that Tiny Tim’s “Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS This Year” was the worst Christmas song of all time. I was wrong and I wasn’t even close.

Because nazis. Fuckers made new lyrics to a number of Christmas carols, replacing existing lyrics referencing the infant King of the Jews with propaganda about Hitler. As far as original songs are concerned, “Exalted Night of the Clear Stars” is banned in Germany and is still sung by neonazis. I hope we’ll never get a worse Christmas song, considering what it took to produce that one.

I worked in a video arcade when it first came out in the 90s and we had a 1-hour VHS tape on a loop that would play music videos and cartoons which got updated once a month. I worked every single day in December (was not legally paid the overtime I was owed, by the way), so I had to listen to that song over and over again once an hour all day every day for a month. And because there were TVs all over the store, it was also almost impossible to not look at the equally awful music video. If you think retail workers now hate it, they can’t possibly hate it with the passion I hate it with or know the pain of why.

twitch

The place I worked was too cheap for actually licensing music so just had a radio on. Crappy Christmas songs, plus utterly inane radio DJ banter and 30% advertisements by duration - including ads for our competitor down the street who were far cheaper than us

Trust me, there are plenty of songs as bad or worse. I get the same reaction to several Daft Punk songs. Mariah Carey isn’t especially bad, no matter what the internet says. There are some especially brain dead christmas remixes stores play during the holidays that make my skin crawl.

“All I waaaaant for Christmaaaas… Is your managerrrrr 🎶”

This version might soothe your ears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RtI5UEZlzU

I left a bar tonight because they had Christmas music on. A fucking bar. Is nothing sacred anymore? Can’t stand Christmas music everywhere