Musician Paul McCartney performs during Desert Trip at the Empire Polo Field on October 15, 2016 in Indio, California.
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There are almost certainly worse holiday songs than Paul McCartney’s 1979 “Wonderful Christmastime.” But in a genre known for cheesiness, this is one of the most polarizing. And it’s notable for being written by the same Beatle who wrote “Let It Be” on the band’s final album.
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Song? You know, McCartney sings “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” a dozen times while a group of children sing “Ding dong, ding dong…” In the 46 years since its release, it has become a seasonal staple — in unavoidable rotation on radio, department store elevator music, and streaming services.
For some, it is attractive and enjoyable. For many others, it is trite and repetitive. The backlash against “Wonderful Christmastime” makes it a perennial regular List of worst Christmas songs,
NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson learned to hate singing while working as a stocker at a grocery store in Iola, Wisconsin, in the late 1980s.
“I hate that song,” he says. He recalls, it seemed as if the game went on continuously throughout December. “It’s this insistent, little synth-pop earworm that once it hooks under your skin, you can’t shake it off. And not in a good way.”
He added, “Paul McCartney didn’t try too hard to come up with a unique feeling.” “It’s just a fun little thing like that.”
Ted Montgomery is the author of paul mccartney catalog And The Beatles through headphones. “The bar is so high with McCartney because he’s such a great songwriter,” he says. “We don’t need to list all the classic songs he wrote.”
But just for fun, let’s go: As a member of the Fab Four, McCartney composed enduring classics like “Eleanor Rigby” and “The Long and Winding Road.” In the latter days of the Beatles, he produced songs such as “Maybe I’m Amazed” and “With a Little Luck”.
It would be hard to find a bigger McCartney fan than Montgomery, although even for him, “Wonderful Christmastime” is a bridge too far.
“The great thing about this song is that they only play it between Thanksgiving and Christmas,” he says.
In ListHis view is even harsher: the instrumentation is “amateurish and banal” and the lyrics “embarrassing”, he writes. Montgomery’s biggest complaint is “it’s all synths.”
In 1979, the versatile Yamaha CS-80 had just appeared. Although the synthesizer – an electronic device that combines sound waves to create music – was not new to the pop world, Yamaha quickly caught on, and McCartney was the first to adopt it. The 1970s and 1980s were a golden age of synthesizers and artists from Michael Jackson to Toto and Bruce Springsteen. CS-80 deployed Around the same time.
Montgomery admits that synthesizers were very popular at the time, “but I don’t like it,” he says. “I’m a purist when it comes to music. I like real instruments.”
Composer and musicologist Nate Sloan takes a more nuanced approach. While he ranked the song near the bottom of all pop songs of the late ’70s, “In the context of the Christmas canon, I think it’s a different story. I think it’s a great Christmas song.”
He explained the seeming contradiction by saying that Christmas songs can be given a wide latitude because “our affection for them is not about any intrinsic creative qualities, but simply our association with the season and festivities and family and joy and comfort.”
Annie Zaleski, author of It’s Christmas, Song by Song: The Stories Behind 100 Holiday HitsPlaces himself “firmly in the camp” of those who like the song. She says, “I think it shows the power of Paul McCartney… his ability to cover this wide spectrum from serious to really fun and crazy.”
She also understands the perspective of those in the camp of haters. Putting the repetitiveness and “fairly redundant” lyrics aside, “I think people were used to Paul writing very dark songs that have a lot of meaning, and this is basically a music festival… It’s also, you know, quite light for him.”
Another defender is music journalist Alison Rapp, who says the first thing to understand is that McCartney has always had a silly side. He wrote “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude”, but also “When I’m 64”.
“If you like the Beatles and you like Paul McCartney, you understand that spectrum has existed for years,” she says.
John Lennon (1940 – 1980) and Yoko Ono on the steps of the Apple Records building in London holding a poster that they distributed in major cities of the world as part of a peace campaign in protest against the Vietnam War. ‘The war is over, if you want it’.
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Some would say even “Wonderful Christmastime” is worse than that of Beatles bandmate John Lennon. “Happy Christmas (The War Is Over)” Co-written with Yoko Ono and released eight years ago. This is unfair, Thompson says, “because those songs have 180-degree diametrically opposite goals.”
He added, “Lennon is making a huge difference with that song about uniting the world and ending war.”
Rapp, for one, thinks the Lennon song’s anti-war message is too preachy for the holidays. “For me, if I had to choose one over the other, it would definitely be ‘Wonderful Christmastime.’
NPR contacted McCartney’s representatives in the US and UK, but they declined to comment for this story. In 2022, the artist himself was quoted paulmccartney.com As he said he likes Christmas songs because they “remind us of the fun atmosphere of the whole season.”
‘When I was writing ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ I was trying to capture that party aspect,’ he said. ‘I expected it to keep coming back – as it has. Sometimes people walk into a store and listen to it too much, but I don’t care! I’m happy!”
Criticism aside, Thompson says it’s really hard to find new things to say about the holidays. While McCartney may fail, “If you succeed – if you write (Mariah Carey’s) ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ – then you’re set for life,” he says. “Having a holiday standard guarantees immortality.”
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