What’s a fitting holiday tune as we recoil in horror at the latest mass shooting (we’ve already had more mass shootings than days in this calendar year,) at the farce of our presidential debates, and the ongoing terroristic attacks on women’s rights and black and brown lives? The usual holiday treacle & pablum that fills the airwaves falls somewhere between naïve and offensive in this context.
Singer-songwriter Macy Gray (criminally underrated as a songwriter) has just dropped a lyric video to her new Christmas song, “All I Want for Christmas,” and it’s not a cover of the Mariah Carey track that has become an American holiday standard. In her trademark gravelly voice, with its shading of wistfulness and melancholy, Gray opens her Christmas shopping list with the disclaimer, “All I want for Christmas is a whole bunch of stuff / But anything that you can buy me won’t be enough / Because everything I’m hoping for is intangible…” before issuing a wish-list for prison reform, compassion for immigrants, global warming to be taken seriously, and for the ills of the ghetto to be addressed. (She is far too generous to Donald Trump, though.)
Yeah, there’s a children’s choir, and fear not – the whole thing arcs toward uplift. But the hope that gleams through Gray’s lyrics and performance is weathered with knowledge of how the world really is, which gives the incredibly catchy tune a genuine poignancy.
Photo courtesy High Rise PR
