Last Christmas is a Great Song, Actually

Last Christmas is in the conversation among the all time best Christmas songs because it is transgressive.

Christmas is the best time of the year. The reason for the season, the birth and incarnation of our savior, is all important and everyone loves to spend time with family. Something that is less talked about, at least in any meaningful way, are the vibes.

Now more than ever before, we live in a country that lacks identity. Despite being the greatest nation in the world, America, in undergoing this crisis, threatens to pull itself apart as various subsets of society long for lost or imagined constructions of America that no longer exist.

This is reflected in how Christmas is celebrated in Twenty-First Century America. The actual celebration of Christmas often has a bittersweet, ephemeral nature to it, especially as we grow older and become more nostalgic, that is in direct contradiction with the overwhelming and eternal joy proclaimed by the gospel as the reason for the season.

This contradiction, however, is critically important. The tension between the message of the gospel and the vibes of Christmas, which all too often involve a longing for a long lost and idealized America whether one considers that to be the post-war period, the 80s, 90s, etc., does not diminish or distract from the importance and centrality of the Nativity, but rather accentuates it. These vibes, properly interpreted, should signify to us the impermanence of the actual celebration of Christmas and the impossibility of the perfect Christmas; thereby elucidating the importance of the eternal aspects of Christmas.

Arguably, a chief contributor to the bittersweet, ephemeral vibe of Christmas in the 2020s is Christmas music. I am not talking about the Christmas music you hear in church. No, we are speaking about Christmas music that is the product of our secular, liberal, cynical America; removed from the “trad” mirages of domestic life.

Specifically, I am referring to the 1984 WHAM! hit Last Christmas. A few weeks ago, at the onset of December, two of my friends and I got into a fight with another friend of ours about our top three favorite Christmas songs. The dispute centered around three of us agreeing that Last Christmas is unquestionably a top three Christmas song, and our other friend wagging his finger at us saying Last Christmas was “modern, cosmopolitan overrated garbage,” before rattling off a provocative and not at all trite list including picks from niche artists Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and Andy Williams. Hard hitting stuff, I know.

Are these Christmas songs bad? No, certainly not, and they have their place in the idyllic fairytale Christmas many dream of. However, this does not place them among the best. Last Christmas is in the conversation among the all time best Christmas songs because it is transgressive.

It is not a song about the perfect wholesome and “trad” Christmas. Last Christmas is so great because more than any other Christmas song it has come to embody the wistful, bittersweet, melancholic, ephemeral, and most of all nostalgic, longing sentiments of December. This embodiment of the Christmas season “zeitgeist” is what makes it so real, and thus so great. As we have already discussed above, the cultivation of this vibe is very important to helping us filter out the noise and better understand the mystery of the Christmas season.

As Americans, it is undeniable that we live in the capital of a global, liberal empire, and thus much of the best art that is produced in America is a product of that global, liberal civilization. It is a mistake when conservatives deny reality and refuse to admit that this empire cannot make excellent art, or that excellent art produced within the boundaries of this empire is somehow able to be divorced from any relation to this liberal, globalist consensus (even “conservative art” is often defined by its opposition to this consensus rather than by being something novel).

Last Christmas, as asserted by my friend, an assertion not contested by me, firmly is a piece of liberal art, and it is an excellent piece of liberal art. Conservatives quite often make the mistake of believing that liberals can not produce good works of art, but oftentimes liberals are in fact better at producing works of art than conservatives. To their credit, the urban, educated liberals make great movies and music, certainly better than conservatives’ hackwork like Mr. Birchum and MAGA Christmas.

Conservatives have a reality problem. Their brains have been fried by kitsch on Twitter, and they now lack rational, critical thinking faculties. This Christmas, I call upon all of you to become men of nuance.

Appreciate Last Christmas and the great artistic works of our liberal American Empire for what they are and what they can offer us in understanding the eternal mystery of Christ’s incarnation in the Nativity through those stirred sentiments that force us to ponder the temporal nature of our reality.

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