SOUNDTRACK: BOOTSY COLLINS-“Sleigh Ride” (2006).
I
n 2006, Stephen Thompson from NPR made a list of the Best, Worst and Weirdest Holiday Albums. One of the weirdest is Christmas is 4-Ever by Bootsy Collins. Starting with the wonderfully weird cover art.
Bootsy starts out by thanking Mrs Claus and then calls himself Booty Claus. He tells us also that he named his weird reindeer Chucky coz he’s funky.
Once the song itself starts, the verse is pretty straightforward, but it’s interspersed with Bootsy’s peculiar sultry talking. About 2 minutes in (the song is 6 minutes long) a new singer introduces some new lyrics, although it quickly gets back on track. The song also features a crazy fiddle solo from Charlie Daniels.
What I find so weird about this song is the presumed funk doesn’t really seem to be in the music. Bootsy’s speaking is certainly funky, but the music itself doesn’t have a lot of funk. And yet, by around 4 and a half minutes I was starting to feel it (perhaps it was the bow wow wows).
Experience it yourself
[READ: December 7, 2013] Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Blue Gem
Since I’m going to write about a few of these, I’ll keep up this little intro bit so I don’t have to re-write the general ideas/criticisms.
These are indeed the actual Arthur Conan Doyle stories just severely edited and truncated. In other words, a lot of the story is cut out and yet the original language is still in place (at least I hope it is, I hope contemporary writers didn’t write the dialogue), so for young kids I think the wording is a little confusing. The drawings are a little too simple for my liking as well. They do effectively convey the story, but I didn’t like the very basicness of them. I feel they make the stories seems a little more childlike than they actually are.
Having said all that however, I found the graphic novels to be a compelling introduction to Sherlock Holmes’ shorter stories (although not for my 8-year-old apparently).
This was one of my favorite of the five stories I read because of the humorous (in my opinion) way that the titular blue gem was hidden–and ultimately found. (more…)
SOUNDTRACK: SUFJAN STEVENS–Astral Inter Planet Space Captain Christmas Infinity Voyage-Songs for Christmas Vol. VIII (2008).
I downloaded this disc from an online source. And no I don’t feel bad about it because it wasn’t officially released, so no one is losing money. If it ever gets released I’ll surely buy it.
This EP comes very close to being my favorite; it may even beat vol 3. In part because the disc is 35 minutes long (still short for Sufjan Stevens but longer than some bands’ full lengths).
This disc has only one guest on it: Bridgit DeCook. And she adds some very nice harmonies to some of the songs. It also contains only one short (less than a minute) instrumental: “The First Noel” (which is a lot of la las and is really nice)The rest of the disc stays around the 3-4 minute mark, with no long songs.
Disc Three of the Sufjan Christmas collection is my favorite. It returns to the more mellow, folksy style of the first disc (and is replete with banjo!). It opens with some thing of a reprise of “O Come, O Come Emanuel” (only a minute long). It’s piano and vocals and very pretty. It proceeds to his boppingest, Christmas song on the whole set: “Come on, Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance” with multiple singers and lots of instruments (and a fugue pattern of voices, too). It continues with two traditional songs: “We Three Kings” (possibly the best version I heard all season) and “O Holy Night.” I’ve mentioned that “O Holy Night is one of my favorite Christmas songs, and this version is quite good, with lovely harmonies (from different people listed although, no one credited specifically for the track) and the way it builds to such a full song by the end.
I Just Read About That... 