I think you nailed it. Excellent opener. @chupacabre is up!
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Alright, that is 13 hrs since Rugby’s pick, and 6 since the clock started ticking this morning. @chupacabre, please make your first pick at any time. @eyebooger is on the clock!
Seems wrong to snipe someone right at the beginning.
I’ll give chupa a few hours.
Draft spreadsheet here:
Please proceed, governor.
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That is one of those that I used to love but now I hate, so not a bad first selection imho.
It’s so funny to look back and see how totally-irrelevant-today acts were part of Band Aid because they were big time back then. Like wtf was Bananarama doing there?? And whatever happened to Paul Young and Spandau Ballet? And Jody Watley and Kool & the Gang weren’t even British!
They were certainly no strangers to awful lyrics:
I bought a ticket to the wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooorld
But now I’ve come back again
Why do I find it hard to write the next line?
Oh, I want the truth to be saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaid
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Think it’s about time to go.
Pick coming right up.
My first round pick that I’m so happy to get.
NewSong - The Christmas Shoes
Just the worst thing ever. To start off, the music is just horrible. It’s that “easy listening” crap that is ironically anything but easy to listen to.
And the subject matter: It’s about a kid who is too poor to buy shoes for his dying mother so she’ll look good if she meets Jesus tonight.
What the everloving fuck?
But it’s okay, the narrator of the story makes himself out to be the hero by making up the cost difference and thanking God that he sent that boy to remind him what Christmas is all about.
This song is really the only reason I joined this draft. Everything else is just gravy.
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God damnit
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No. There’s not a movie.
There’s a trilogy.
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LOL the 2nd one stars Neil Patrick Harris? What the hell?
Sniped or not, you’re on the clock!
Ok, working on it now. In the meantime, here’s Patton Oswalt on Christmas Shoes:
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Before diving in, I think it’s important to figure out what we’re doing here - what makes one Christmas song worse than another? There are myriad factors:
- The lyrics
- The musicality
- How much it relates (or doesn’t) to Christmas
- The frequency with which you’re faced with the song at Christmas
And there are natural tradeoffs involved. As an illustration, when I was doing research I happened upon a truly terrible song called [redacted]. It might very well be the worst Christmas song ever, but I’ve never heard it in the wild. So I can’t in good faith draft it. (At least not this early.)
I think these tradeoffs are evident in the first two picks. Do They Know It’s Christmas ticks a lot of boxes: its lyrics are offensive and non-sensical, not to mention completely anti-Christmas (“Tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you…”???). Moreover, it is clearly a high frequency song that you’re almost certainly going to hear if you spend more than 45 minutes in your local retail store during the next month.
BUT, the music is undeniably catchy, and if you only kind of half-heartedly listen to the lyrics it’s a really fun song! If it comes on the radio, I’m not skipping it, and how could you say that about the worst song?
Christmas Shoes has the opposite problem. It’s undeniably a terrible song. Lyrics? Terrible. Music? Terrible. Music video? Terrible. But it is absolutely about the Christmas spirit. And another problem here is you don’t really hear this in the wild - I definitely don’t think I’ve heard it in the last 10 years, at least.
So with my first pick of the draft, I’m going with a song that I think ticks every box:
- The lyrics are ridiculous, and are liberally interspersed with "Jing-a-di-jing"s and "hee-haw"s.
- Musically, it is an aural assualt on the ears.
- It describes a Christmas legend that no one outside of New Jersey has ever heard of.
- Growing up in New Jersey, this song was inescapable. So I think it quasi ticks the frequency box. Call it regionally frequent.
My pick is Dominick the Donkey:
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I agree with basically everything in your post, except for the tiny factor that I, a West Coast dweller for most of my life, have not been assaulted with this song much (almost never). Mercifully. It’s an abomination. Great pick, and plenty of respect for adding the personal animus.
My face remains unmelted in this draft, but my ears are in agony.
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