Christmas Is Coming!

Two weeks to go until the begining of December, give or take. I should probably start thinking about the Inventory Full Advent Calendar. 

Hah! Kidding! I've been working on it since September! Too much so, in fact. I had enough possibles for five calendars weeks ago -literally - and even then I couldn't stop so now I have even more.

Seriously, I had no idea how many Christmas songs there were. There must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands, with more piling up every year. 

There's been an active commercial market in the things for at least seventy years (I'd love to blame blame Phil Spector for it all but he was just riding a wave that formed far out in the great ocean of popular music long before he came along with his wild hair and his wilder ideas. In the year Spector released A Christmas Gift For You,1964, Wikipedia lists ten other Christmas albums, even though Phil's is the only one anyone remembers now.

It's nice of whoever curates that wiki page to keep a tally, although I imagine there are more albums than they know about. The L.P. as we understand it only dates back to the nineteen-fifties anyway but I'm sure people were writing and releasing Christmas novelty songs long before then. 

If so, they can stay lost in the seasonal snowdrifts of time. I'm only really interested in stuff from the rock and roll era onward. I don't plan on digging up whatever it was the big bands got up to for Christmas, let alone the vaudevillians or the music halls. I bet they were all at it, though.

When it comes to pop songs for Christmas, the tip of the iceberg is always the big hit singles. What's going to be #1 for Christmas is a seasonal news story even now, when chart placings really don't mean much to most people any more. (Try telling that to Taylor Swift!) 

For the determined researcher, though, Christmas albums are the root of the problem. Hardly anyone seems content just to release a Christmas single and leave it at that. It has to be an E.P. at least (And isn't it weird that artists still call them "E.P.s" in the age of streaming? They do, you know, when they're not calling them "Mixtapes", which is even more confusing.) 

 Christmas Is Coming Soon - Blitzen Trapper

Have you any idea how many people have made whole albums of Christmas songs? Too bloody many, I'll tell you that for free!

Once again according to Wikipedia, those eleven albums in 1964 had ballooned to an obscene sixty-nine by 2008.  Luckily for all of us, that was the peak, after which numbers began to decline util last year there were only ten. Or only ten Wikipedia wants to admit to, anyway. Who knows how they're gathering their data?

In this modern age, of course, now access to global media has been thoroughly democratized, you don't need to be any kind of professional musician or record producer to go all in on Christmas tunes. In the YouTube era, far too many people have taken it upon themselves to make Christmas playlists. I started putting one of my own together just a couple of days ago. I mean, I had all these Xmas songs so why not? I never said I wasn't part of the problem. 

I don't Spotify but I imagine it's rife over there as well. You're probably putting a playlist together right now, aren't you?

All of this festive fecundity led me to set some ground rules for the Calendar:

• No asset-stripping other peoples' playlists for ideas. Too cheap.
  
• No going through Christmas albums to pick out the best track. Too much work.
  
• No really, really obvious choices. Leave that to the supermarkets.
  
• Aim for originals. Any covers better be pretty darn special.
• No duplication. One song per artist.
• At least try to mix things up. Some genres are way too liberal with the tinsel.
  

All of which may be very noble but it doesn't half make it all take forever. Of course my loving it doesn't help.

I'm sure everyone's just itching to hear my methodology. I started out doing keyword searches in YouTube along the lines of "Christmas song indie" or "Christmas song funk" but that didn't work as well as you might imagine, mainly because it kept bringing up those goddam playlists over and over again. There must be about a bazillion of them. Sometimes I had to scroll through dozens of entries before I got to an actual song.

I had a lot more luck pumping in random band names plus the word "Christmas". For some weird reason, the first I tried was Gentle Giant. I think I was trying to test the possibilities by coming up with the band least likely to have worn party hats and appeared on children's TV. 

It may not surprise you to hear that Gentle Giant did not, as far as I can tell, ever record a Christmas number, although thanks to the search I now know the proggers did once come up with something called Pantagruel's Nativity. It sounds like a free jazz ensemble gamely trying to fulfill the contract after their manager mistakenly booked them to appear at a Renaissance Fayre and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas, or not in the ninety seconds I could take of the six and half minutes, anyway.

I Don't Wanna Wait Til Christmas - Summer Camp

For my purposes, it didn't seem to matter whether the band I picked as a seed had ever released a Christmas song or not (Although you'd be surprised who has and who hasn't.) Whether the result was positive or not, there'd usually be a few algorithmic suggestions worth checking out. I found some interesting examples of the craft that way.

When that palled, I tried random, seasonal words like "Santa" or "tinsel" or "snow". I had some successes there but in the end I mostly found myself following the tried and true method of link-hopping, jumping from one likely result to another until the whole thing fell apart in a flurry of metal or slick r&b.

I got into the habit of taking half an hour or so at the end of every evening, after I'd watched a couple of shows on Netflix, switching to YouTube to flip through link after link until I was too tired to judge whether what I was seeing and hearing was any good. Some nights I didn't stop nearly soon enough if a few of the tracks I bookmarked are anything to go by.

The whole thing became quite addictive after a while, which is how I ended up with too many songs to choose from. I ought to have stopped weeks ago but I was having too much fun.

As much as anything, I love the unpredictability of it all. It feeds right into my love of randomness. Some nights I barely find anything of interest, others it seems like every second link I click is worth bookmarking. I even came across a couple of acts who both specialize in Christmas music and are good at it.

Eventually, I just had to force myself to stop, which wasn't easy. I'm still occasionally picking away at the Christmas scab even now. That's mostly why I'm writing this post, to try and draw a line under the gathering stage and move on to the choosing. I need to pick twenty-five winners and it's hard. 

If it is just twenty-five, that is...

I'm still thinking that one over. I considered including multiple tunes per post, preferably very different in style, so as to give readers a better chance of hearing something they liked. Then I realized hardly anyone is going to click on even one Christmas song every day for three and a half weeks (Hi, Redbeard!) so upping the count wasn't likely to help anyone.

I still might do something along those lines. Maybe a crowd-pleaser and a more challenging choice on every page? I quite like that idea but it is predicated on the theory that I have twenty-five "crowd-pleasers" lined up and I'm not at all sure that's true. Twenty five unlistenable rackets, though - that's ought to be no problem at all!

We Need A Little Christmas - Nancy Sinatra

Then there's the art to consider. I've barely given it a thought but sourcing pictures to go at the top of the posts takes almost as long as finding the songs so I probably should get on that right away. 

The first year I did it, I spent hours, trawling through royalty-free seasonal images, looking for anything that wasn't absolutely repugnant. It was fun for a while but then it got to be hard work and the results weren't exactly inspiring. I don't want to do that again.

Last year, I went all-in on AI images and lost several regular readers as a direct result. Some people just can't abide the look, some have political objections, others have an existential dread of the technology. Gonna suck to be any of those people for a few years, I think, because it's only going to get worse. Still, no reason for me to add to their anxieties. This ought to feel like a safe space - especially at Christmas!

On the other hand, I had a ton of fun generating those images, many of which made me laugh out loud. It was also lot quicker than sifting through hundreds of stock images and quite honestly doing that made me feel more grubby than playing with AI. Garbage is garbage, however you source it, but at least AI garbage can be funny once in a while. 

Or it seemed like it could a year ago. Things have changed.

Last year, the results I got using AI were... let's be kind and say variable... but AI image generators are orders of magnitude better now, if by better you mean predictable. I'm sure I could come up with some convincingly seasonal pictures in next to no time.

The thing is, even I'm going a bit stale on AI just now. It was fun when it was all weird and wacky and seemed like it was made by a bunch of crazy little robots all running around with a few cogs missing but now it's slick and ubiquitous and you can't get away from it and it's not nearly as much fun as it used to be. Nostalgia for the early days of AI. It's a thing. Already.

Still, I can't deny it's tempting. It's so easy. And it's right there. I'm toying with the idea of generating the images with AI and then fucking them up manually, the way I do with the pictures I use at the top of music posts. Or maybe I'll just do it myself. If we get some snow or even some frost I could go out and take photographs...

I'll think of something. I've got two weeks. And I did say last year that I had more fun when I stopped prepping and just put the posts together on the day they were due. Maybe I'll do that again.

I mean, it's not like there's much else to do in December, right?

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Notes on AI used in this post: This is an interesting one. I considered splitting it off into a post of its own but I'll carry on here and try to keep it short. 

The only AI is in the image at the top of the post, obviously, and it's only partially AI at that. What I did was take a frame from a video I shot back in the winter of 2017, when we had some snow near where I live. I then ran that frame through a bunch of filters in Paint.net and generally messed around with it until it looked like this:

Then I uploaded the file to NightCafe and used it as the starting image for the following prompt: "1950s car loaded with presents on the roof rack driving down a snowy country road". The model was Flux Schnell and I set the noise at 25% and the prompt weight to 75% to keep the result close to the original.

That got me this image:

Finally, I took that one back to Paint.net and played around with it a little more to get the image I ended up using.

I'd be very interested to hear comments on the process, particularly from anyone who has objections to AI images either in principle or aesthetically. To what extent is this image "mine"? Does the fact that AI was used at all taint the whole thing? Is there a substantive difference between using software to alter an image and using AI to add things to it? What if I'd used AI to change the colors or the lighting but not to add the cars? Where are you drawing the lines?

Probably should have been a post of its own after all and very well might be still. At the moment I'm leaning towards using my own photos and video, enhanced and altered by AI, for the pictures in this year's calendars, not least because it's really fun to do. 

All thoughts and observations welcome.