The clip above aired back in 2013 on “This Is Radio Clash,” a radio show hosted by the Clash’s Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon. “Hello everybody,” this is David Bowie making a telephone call from the US of A. At this time of the year I can’t help but remember my British-ness and all the jolly British folk, so here’s to you and have yourselves a Merry little Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you very much.”
It’s maybe not as memorable as his 1977 Christmas duet with Bing Crosby, but, hey, it’s still a fun little way to get the holiday season in swing.
Bonus: Below hear Bowie sing Presley’s classic “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.” I hadn’t heard it before, and it’s a treat.
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Note: With the recent passing of Shane Macgowan, we’re bringing back a post from 2018 and revisiting The Pogues’ song “Fairytale of New York.” The offbeat Christmas classic is currently #5 on the Billboard Singles Chart in the UK.
Drugstore Cowboy, Barfly, Leaving Las Vegas, even Bonnie and Clyde… we love a good story about doomed, down-and-out lovers. Whatever emotional reservoir they tap into, when written well and honestly, such stories have broad cultural appeal. Which in part explains the overwhelming popularity of The Pogues’ 1987 classic “Fairytale of New York,” the kind of “anti-Christmas song,” writes Dorian Lynsky at The Guardian, “that ended up being, for a generation, the Christmas song.”
Many holiday stories cynically trade on the fact that, for a great many people, the holidays are filled with pain and loss. But “Fairytale of New York” doesn’t play this for laughs, nor does it pull the old trick of cheap last-minute redemption.
Sung as a duet by Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl to the boozy tune of an Irish folk ballad, the song “is loved because it feels more emotionally ‘real’ than the homesick sentimentality of ‘White Christmas.’ ” Even if we can’t identify with the plight of a burned-out Irish dreamer spending Christmas in a New York drunk tank, we can feel the ache of broken dreams set in high relief against holiday lights.
The song’s history itself makes for a compelling tale, whether we believe the origin story in accordion player James Fearnley’s memoir Here ComesEverybody: The Story of the Poguesor that told by MacGowan, who maintains that Elvis Costello, the band’s producer, bet the singer that he couldn’t write a Christmas duet. (Fearnley writes that they were trying to top The Band’s 1977 “Christmas Must Be Tonight.”)
Either way, a Christmas song was a good idea. “For a band like the Pogues, very strongly rooted in all kinds of traditions rather than the present, it was a no-brainer,” says banjo-player and co-writer Jem Finer. Not to mention the fact that MacGowan was born on Christmas Day 1957.
Finer began the song as a tale about a sailor missing his wife on Christmas, but after the banjo player’s wife called it “corny” he took her suggestion to adapt the “true story of some mutual friends living in New York.” MacGowan took the title from J.P. Donleavy’s 1973 novel A Fairy Tale of New York, which happened to be lying around the recording studio. After a promising start, the song then went through two years of revisions and re-recordings before the band finally settled on the version millions know and love, produced by Steve Lillywhite and released on the 1988 album If I Should Fall From Grace with God.
Originally intended as a duet between MacGowan and bass player Cait O’Riordan, a version recorded with her was “not quite there,” guitarist Philip Chevron has said. Soon after, O’Riordan left the band, and MacGowan recorded the song again at Abbey Road in 1987, singing both the male and female vocal parts himself. Eventually Lillywhite took the track home to have his wife, English singer Kirsty MacColl, record a temporary guide vocal for the female parts. When MacGowan heard it, he knew he had found the right foil for the character he plays in the song.
“Kirsty knew exactly the right measure of viciousness and femininity and romance to put into it and she had a very strong character and it came across in a big way,” MacGowan later remarked in an interview. “In operas, if you have a double aria, it’s what the woman does that really matters. the man lies, the woman tells the truth.” As part of her character’s “viciousness”, she hurls the slur “f*ggot” at MacGowan, who calls her a “slut.” The offensive words have been censored on radio stations, then uncensored, and good cases have been made for bleeping them out (most recently by Irish DJ Eoghan McDermott on Twitter).
MacGowan himself has issued a statement defending the lyrics as in keeping with the characters. “Sometimes characters in songs and stories have to be evil or nasty in order to tell the story effectively,” he writes, adding, “If people don’t understand that I was trying to accurately portray the character as authentically as possible then I am absolutely fine with them bleeping the word but I don’t want to get into an argument.” Whatever position one takes on this, it’s hard to deny that MacGowan, co-writer Finer, and MacColl totally hit the mark when it comes to authenticity.
The genuine emotions “Fairytale of New York” taps into has made it the most beloved Christmas song of all time in TV, radio, and magazine polls in the UK and Ireland. It has become “far bigger than the people who made it,” writes Lynskey. Or, as Fearnley puts it, “It’s like ‘Fairytale of New York’ went off and inhabited its own planet.” An artist can’t ask for more. See making-of videos by the BBC and Polyphonic at the top. Watch the band sloppily mime the song with MacColl on Top of the Pops further up (MacGowan cannot actually play the piano). And just above, see the official video, starring Drugstore Cowboy’s Matt Dillon—filmed inside a real police station on the Lower East Side during a freezing Thanksgiving week in 1987, for maximum holiday vérité.
The received image of the Aztecs, with their savage battles and frequent acts of human sacrifice, tends to imply a violence-saturated, death-obsessed culture. Given that, it will hardly come as a surprise to learn of an Aztec musical instrument discovered in the hands of a sacrificed human body, or that the instrument has come to be known as the “death whistle.” Not that it was an especially recent find: the excavation in question happened in Mexico City in the late nineteen-nineties. But only over the past decade, with the creation of replicas like the one played by the late Xavier Quijas Yxayotl in the clip above, have listeners around the world been able to hear the death whistle for themselves.
“The sound of the death whistle is the most frightening thing we’ve ever heard,” writes Reuben Westmaas at Discovery.com. “It literally sounds like a screeching zombie. We can only imagine what it would be like to hear hundreds of whistles from an Aztec army on the march. We’re not entirely certain what the whistles were used for, however.”
Whatever its application, the distinctive sound of the death whistle is created by blown air interacting “with a well or ‘spring’ of air inside a rounded internal chamber, creating distortions,” as Dave Roos writes at How Stuff Works. In his analysis of the death whistle’s inner workings, mechanical engineer Roberto Velázquez Cabrera gives that component the evocative name “chaos chamber.”
That the death whistle would be used in war and human sacrifice certainly aligns with the reputation of the Aztecs, but the instrument has also inspired other historically informed speculations. In the video from Gizmodo just above, professor of Mesoamerican and Latino studies Jaime Arredondo even suggests that it could have had its therapeutic uses, as a tool to create a “hypnotic, sort of soothing atmosphere.” It could well have been designed to imitate the sound of the wind, given that the sacrificial victim had been buried at the temple of the wind god Ehecatl. And though the death whistle may seem the least likely tool of relaxation imaginable, put your mind to it and just hear it as sounding less like the screech of a zombie than like the fifteenth-century equivalent of a white-noise machine.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
You can hang onto the source of Rudolph’s shame and eventual triumph — the glowing red nose that got him bounced from his playmates’ reindeer games before saving Christmas.
Lose all those other now-iconic elements — the Island of Misfit Toys, long-lashed love interest Clarice, the Abominable Snow Monster of the North, Yukon Cornelius, Sam the Snowman, and Hermey the aspirant dentist elf.
As originally conceived, Rudolph (runner up names: Rollo, Rodney, Roland, Roderick and Reginald) wasn’t even a resident of the North Pole.
He lived with a bunch of other reindeer in an unremarkable house somewhere along Santa’s delivery route.
Santa treated Rudolph’s household as if it were a human address, coming down the chimney with presents while the occupants were asleep in their beds.
To get to Rudolph’s origin story we must travel back in time to January 1939, when a Montgomery Ward department head was already looking for a nationwide holiday promotion to draw customers to its stores during the December holidays.
He settled on a book to be produced in house and given away free of charge to any child accompanying their parent to the store.
Copywriter Robert L. May was charged with coming up with a holiday narrative starring an animal similar to Ferdinand the Bull.
After giving the matter some thought, May tapped Denver Gillen, a pal in Montgomery Ward’s art department, to draw his underdog hero, an appealing-looking young deer with a red nose big enough to guide a sleigh through thick fog.
(That schnozz is not without controversy. Prior to Caitlin Flanagan’s 2020 essay in the Atlantic chafing at the television special’s explicitly cruel depictions of othering the oddball, Montgomery Ward fretted that customers would interpret a red nose as drunkenness. In May’s telling, Santa is so uncomfortable bringing up the true nature of the deer’s abnormality, he pretends that Rudolph’s “wonderful forehead” is the necessary headlamp for his sleigh…)
On the strength of Gillen’s sketches, May was given the go-ahead to write the text.
His rhyming couplets weren’t exactly the stuff of great children’s literature. A sampling:
Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the hills,
The reindeer were playing, enjoying the spills.
Of skating and coasting, and climbing the willows,
And hopscotch and leapfrog, protected by pillows.
___
And Santa was right (as he usually is)
The fog was as thick as a soda’s white fizz
—-
The room he came down in was blacker than ink
He went for a chair and then found it a sink!
No matter.
May’s employer wasn’t much concerned with the artfulness of the tale. It was far more interested in its potential as a marketing tool.
“We believe that an exclusive story like this aggressively advertised in our newspaper ads and circulars…can bring every store an incalculable amount of publicity, and, far more important, a tremendous amount of Christmas traffic,” read the announcement that the Retail Sales Department sent to all Montgomery Ward retail store managers on September 1, 1939.
Over 800 stores opted in, ordering 2,365,016 copies at 1½¢ per unit.
Promotional posters touted the 32-page freebie as “the rollickingest, rip-roaringest, riot-provokingest, Christmas give-away your town has ever seen!”
The advertising manager of Iowa’s Clinton Herald formally apologized for the paper’s failure to cover the Rudolph phenomenon — its local Montgomery Ward branch had opted out of the promotion and there was a sense that any story it ran might indeed create a riot on the sales floor.
His letter is just but one piece of Rudolph-related ephemera preserved in a 54-page scrapbook that is now part of the Robert Lewis May Collection at Dartmouth, May’s alma mater.
Another page boasts a letter from a boy named Robert Rosenbaum, who wrote to thank Montgomery Ward for his copy:
I enjoyed the book very much. My sister could not read it so I read it to her. The man that wrote it done better than I could in all my born days, and that’s nine years.
The magic ingredient that transformed a marketing scheme into an evergreen if not universally beloved Christmas tradition is a song …with an unexpected side order of corporate generosity.
May’s wife died of cancer when he was working on Rudolph, leaving him a single parent with a pile of medical bills. After Montgomery Ward repeated the Rudolph promotion in 1946, distributing an additional 3,600,000 copies, its Board of Directors voted to ease his burden by granting him the copyright to his creation.
Once he held the reins to the “most famous reindeer of all”, May enlisted his songwriter brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, to adapt Rudolph’s story.
The simple lyrics, made famous by singing cowboy Gene Autry’s 1949 hit recording, provided May with a revenue stream and Rankin/Bass with a skeletal outline for its 1964 stop-animation special.
The Beatles or the Stones? We’ve been debating that question for the past 60 years. Above, the London-based company Dog & Rabbit continues the conversation with a clever video that animates Beatles and Stones album covers. From there, all kinds of high jinks ensue.
The “Beatles vs The Stones” animation has won awards at various festivals. Recently made available online, you can watch it above.
On Friday, Glen Hansard & Lisa O’Neill performed “Fairytale of New York” at Shane MacGowan’s funeral, giving the Pogues’ frontman quite the send-off. The moving performance took place before a packed church in Nenagh, a country town in Ireland. And it all ends, perhaps fittingly, with mourners dancing in the aisles. Below, you can also watch Nick Cave perform a Pogues song from 1986, “A Rainy Night in Soho.”
Before electronic amplification, instrument makers and musicians had to find newer and better ways to make themselves heard among ensembles and orchestras and above the din of crowds. Many of the acoustic instruments we’re familiar with today—guitars, cellos, violas, etc.—are the result of hundreds of years of experimentation focused on solving just that problem. These hollow wooden resonance chambers amplify the sound of the strings, but that sound must escape, hence the circular sound hole under the strings of an acoustic guitar and the f‑holes on either side of a violin.
I’ve often wondered about this particular shape and assumed it was simply an affected holdover from the Renaissance. While it’s true f‑holes date from the Renaissance, they are much more than ornamental; their design—whether arrived at by accident or by conscious intent—has had remarkable staying power for very good reason.
As acoustician Nicholas Makris and his colleagues at MIT announced in a study published by the Royal Society, a violin’s f‑holes serve as the perfect means of delivering its powerful acoustic sound. F‑holes have “twice the sonic power,” The Economist reports, “of the circular holes of the fithele” (the violin’s 10th century ancestor and origin of the word “fiddle”).
The evolutionary path of this elegant innovation—Clive Thompson at Boing Boing demonstrates with a color-coded chart—takes us from those original round holes, to a half-moon, then to variously-elaborated c‑shapes, and finally to the f‑hole. That slow historical development casts doubt on the theory in the above video, which argues that the 16th-century Amati family of violin makers arrived at the shape by peeling a clementine, perhaps, and placing flat the surface area of the sphere. But it’s an intriguing possibility nonetheless.
Instead, through an “analysis of 470 instruments… made between 1560 and 1750,” Makris, his co-authors, and violin maker Roman Barnas discovered, writes The Economist, that the “change was gradual—and consistent.” As in biology, so in instrument design: the f‑holes arose from “natural mutation,” writes Jennifer Chu at MIT News, “or in this case, craftsmanship error.” Makers inevitably created imperfect copies of other instruments. Once violin makers like the famed Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri families arrived at the f‑hole, however, they found they had a superior shape, and “they definitely knew what was a better instrument to replicate,” says Makris. Whether or not those master craftsmen understood the mathematical principles of the f‑hole, we cannot say.
What Makris and his team found is a relationship between “the linear proportionality of conductance” and “sound hole perimeter length.” In other words, the more elongated the sound hole, the more sound can escape from the violin. “What’s more,” Chu adds, “an elongated sound hole takes up little space on the violin, while still producing a full sound—a design that the researchers found to be more power-efficient” than previous sound holes. “Only at the very end of the period” between the 16th and the 18th centuries, The Economist writes, “might a deliberate change have been made” to violin design, “as the holes suddenly get longer.” But it appears that at this point, the evolution of the violin had arrived at an “optimal result.” Attempts in the 19th century to “fiddle further with the f‑holes’ designs actually served to make things worse, and did not endure.”
To read the mathematical demonstrations of the f‑hole’s superior “conductance,” see Makris and his co-authors’ published paper here. And to see how a contemporary violin maker cuts the instrument’s f‑holes, see a careful demonstration in the video above.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
We’re taking you on a wistful trip down memory lane. Above, Shane MacGowan and Sinéad O’Connor perform “Haunted” on the British music show, The White Room. Originally recorded in 1986 with Cait O’Riordan on vocals, “Haunted” got a second lease on life in 1995 when MacGowan and O’Connor cut a new version, combining her ethereal vocals with his inimitable songwriting and whiskey-soaked voice. Below, they both appear in an interview recorded during the same period.
The two Irish musicians first met in London during the 1980s, starting a friendship that would have its ups and downs. Their collaboration on “Haunted” marked a high point. Then, in 1999, O’Connor called the police when she found MacGowan doing heroin at home. Angered at first, MacGowan later credited the intervention with helping him kick his habit. When Sinéad gave birth to her third child in 2004, she named him Shane, in honor of her friend.
MacGowan and O’Connor both died this year, just months apart from one another. As you watch their duet, you can’t help but feel the sand running through the hourglass. It leaves you feeling grateful for what we had, and sad for what we have lost. May they rest in peace.
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