I Really Hate "Last Christmas"

I don't remember this song growing up.

When it first came out (in 1984, according to Wikipedia), I was 6 years old, still too young to be fully aware of pop culture trends.

I don't remember it at all during my adolescent and teenage years in the 1990s.  It could be that I was just oblivious to it.  Or it could be (as this awl.com article posits) that the song underwent a resurgence in popularity about 2001ish when a bunch of other bands began covering it.   (Most probably, I was just oblivious to it.  I've been oblivious to a lot of stuff during my life.)

All I know is that I first became aware of the song when I was in Japan.  It was played constantly over the loudspeakers in all the shopping malls in Japan.

My first thought was that this was some sort of Japanese song with English lyrics.  Sometimes J-Pop artists will attempt to do English version of songs, and this song seemed like it had J-Pop written all over it.  The slow, saccharine melody sounded like it would be right at home in J-Pop, plus the lyrics sounded distinctly like someone who was writing in English as a non-native speaker.  There seemed to be no awareness of the way English poetry or song lines normally work--instead of having identifiable song lines in the music, with identifiable beats or rhythms or stresses or rhymes,  the singer would just would just ramble on until the music got to a pause, and then just take a break and continue right where he left off.

Even once I figured out that this song was by a genuine American native speaker, the fact that it was extremely popular in Japan did not immediately make me think it was some sort of Christmas classic I had missed out on.  Sometimes strange little pieces of American culture, things that get completely forgotten about back home, become extremely popular abroad and end up taking on new lives overseas.  (The most popular American music group in Japan are The Carpenters.)

The one thing I knew for sure, though, was that I absolutely hated this song.  It was one of those songs that was guaranteed to give me a headache from the first few notes.  When I got together with other foreigners, I complained about the prevalence of this song in Japan, but I always just attributed this to the fact that Japanese people have funny tastes in English music.

But in recent years, I've been discovering that a lot of people like this song.  And not just Japanese people, but Americans, Brits, Australians--even people I used to respect.

In Cambodia, I once caught a co-worker of mine, an Australian, using this song in his English classes.  He had designed a gap-fill song sheet for the students to complete, and he accidentally left one of his copies in the copy machine.  When I saw the song-sheet, I confronted him about it.
"I can't believe you're making your students listen to this!" I said, throwing the song-sheet down on his desk angrily.
Rather than have the decency to act sheepish about it, or to apologize for his actions, he actually seemed confused as to why I was upset.  "What?" he said.  "It's a good song."

At my new job in Vietnam, I was recently at a company work shop in which this song was given as an example of a good Christmas song to do with the students.  Of course, I immediately protested that this was the worst song ever, only to find, much to my amazement, that I was the only one in the room who felt that way.

I used to assume everyone was in agreement with me about how horrible this song was, and that I didn't actually need to explain it to them.  For example, whenever the song came on the loudspeakers, I thought I could just be like, "Oh, this again.  This is the worst song ever!  Right guys?"  And everyone would be like, "Yeah, you said it!"
But more and more, I'm finding that people are actually resisting me on this, and not simply agreeing that it's a bad song, but challenging me on it.  "Why do you hate this song so much?" I get asked.

Have you ever had to explain why a song was good or bad?  It's very difficult to articulate into words, and I find myself just sputtering incoherently and saying things like, "What?  But don't you--?  I mean, can't you just hear it?  Doesn't it--?  Are you telling me you don't have a huge headache right now just listening to it?"

While, this may be an exercise in futility, but I thought I would try, as best I could, to put into words exactly why this song sucks so much:

First, the melody.  What is this?  It's just like the same two notes going back and forth painfully slowly, and then speeding up a little bit at the end.
And the music doesn't have any sort of hook, or punches, or any sort of punctuation to let you know when you've gotten to the end of a line.  It's just like the notes meander for a while like they're lost and don't know where the song is going, and then it just stops.  And then it repeats.

And it's so painfully slow.  It's only got a couple of notes, but each one is just held way too long.

And then there's the singer's voice--it's whiny.  He just whines his way through the whole song.  You want to slap him, and say, "nobody likes to hear people whine.  If you can't say it nicely, then you'll have to go to your room until you're ready to speak like an adult."

And the words...what is up with those words?  Are those supposed to be verses?  There's no meter, there's no rhythm, there's no attempts at any of the things that traditionally define lyrics in English.  The singer just whines about something for a while, and then just pauses when the music pauses, and starts whining again.

The words are essentially meaningless.  ("Gave you my heart"--what does that even mean?).  But when so much of popular music is based off of meaningless lyrics,  I guess you can't fault this song too much for that.
But man, does it take forever for the singer to say what he wants to say.  Every word is held out for a long time over a slow moving note.  If it's two syllables (Christ--mas) it's broken down into two slow notes.  The whole thing sounds like the singer is undergoing a stroke, and is just barely able to get out the words he wants to say.  "Laaaast Chriissst-mmasss I gave you myyyy heaaart..."  And I just want to scream, "Come on already!  Just say it!!!"

Last word on the whole matter goes to David Mitchell: