The first time this year was Frances' post on the movie Basquiat. Somehow neither of us recalled Fairytale at the start of the movie, which makes me wonder if it's a new edit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3uqhDDVrUYIt just repeats the first verse, but that's the best part of the song to me. Like I've said before, I'm not a huge fan of it and I don't live in Ireland or the UK, so I only hear it by accident. I'd almost forgotten exactly why I don't like it, but then I remembered that the female is supposedly singing from a hospital bed recovering from a drug overdose with an IV drip sustaining her. Besides that being just stupid, it seems insanely callous to exploit that kind of scenario for a Christmas song. I'm sure there are tons of people who are really trapped in that kind of desperate situation during the holidays, and to romanticize it is just not cool at all. I'll give Shane and Jem and the Pogues a pass because I feel like it was probably the record company pushing the idea, and I'm not surprised that the powers-that-be in this world would parade the song into the charts every year since they like to milk tragedies for all they're worth. But if it's true that it makes Shane half a million dollars a year in royalties from it (which I somehow doubt), I think all of it should be directly distributed in person to homeless people at Christmastime. Maybe in a different world, huh? But then I doubt there would be homeless in that different world in the first place. So there you have it, my unGrinchly Grinch moment of the season.
Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2017 1:20 am