Boombox Serenade

Our Annual List of Alt-Christmas Radio Stations on the Interwebs

Well, we don't know what to tell Virginia about the fact that our favorite Internet radio station of punk rock Christmas music has disappeared this year, but there's still plenty of non-traditional and off-the-beaten-track holiday music out there. Enjoy!

1. Xmas in Frisko. One of San Francisco's finest exports, SomaFM continues to specialize in bringing us the most deliciously eccentric holiday music out there. A recent session yielded "Christmas Wrap" by Two Live Jews, "Twas The Night Before Jesus" by Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and "Santa Claus Is A Black Man" by The Teddy Vann Production Company. Special.

2. Radio Neige Folle. "Neige folle" means "fresh snow" (or literally, "crazy snow") and this radio station features gorgeous old French-language Christmas music from 1915 through the years. A really nice change of pace when Bono has invoked the clanging chimes of doom one too many times, and as an added bonus, you can hear the pop and hiss of old vinyl on many of this station's selections.

3. The Holiday Sub-Channels at Accuradio. There's an entire channel here called "Wait They Made a Christmas Album?" and it's a great choice (currently playing The Flaming Lips) as is the Reggae Christmas channel, the Non-Standard Christmas channel, and Smooth Hanukkah. Something for everyone really.

4. Dysfunctional Christmas. The folks at Slacker.com may have made baby Jesus cry with this one, but they made us do the opposite of cry. You'll need to create a free account to listen, but it's well worth it.

5. Prisoners of Technology. Some enterprising DJ has taken it upon himself to add jingle bells to every electro-pop track out there and is playing them now through December 25th. And if you've never heard "Love Will Tear Us Apart" with jingle bells, you really should.

6. Lagniappe Christmas. Highly eclectic holiday music from the Big Easy, where they spike their carols with Bourbon Street style and serve up the occasional cheeseball of rock too, such as AC/DC's, "I Want a Mistress for Christmas."

7. Holiday Hip Hop. This is a shared station on Pandora where you'll hear "Santa Baby" like you've never heard it before, including a wish list that has "jobs in the ghetto" as one of its top requests.

8. 181 FM's Christmas Swing. Skip right over "Christmas Power" and the other schlock and head straight for "Christmas Swing," a holly jolly line-up of vintage tracks from the 20's, 30's and 40's. Lots of stuff you've never heard before.

9. Cracked Christmas. Specializing in "comedy Christmas songs," Cracked plays feel-good tracks like Weird Al Yankovic's "The Night Santa Went Crazy." "Well, the workshop is gone now, he decided to bomb it. Everywhere you'll find pieces of Cupid and Comet. And he tied up his helpers, and he held the elves hostage. And he ground up poor Rudolph into reindeer sausage." Nuff said.

10. Smoky Mountain Christmas. Home spun and hickory smoked Christmas music from bands with names like "Clarke Family and the Pine Street Musicians" and "Larry Sparks & The Lonesome Ramblers." Totally authentic and tumbledown pretty. Note, you may have to do the free registration thing to listen.  

Happy Holidays from Boombox Serenade!

aworldofhelp.com

The Two Outrageously Strong Film-Music Moments in Lee Daniels' "Precious"

With all the ink that's been spilled on "Precious," there still hasn't been enough said about the way Lee Daniels uses music in this film, so I'll start the conversation simply by saying how beautifully bold he is about using non-score music as emotional content in his work—just totally fearless about turning up the volume on music and really letting it take over for a good stretch of time. If that doesn't sound like a particularly impressive filmmaking skill to you, note how few directors can truly do it. The garden variety ones can often be recognized by how timid they are with licensed tracks, venturing out only with sorry little snippets—teaspoons of feeling they dribble into a scene like they're dropping a name.

And then there's Mister Lee Daniels, with his great big bounding heart, who sees and feels it all and who uses music like a lantern designed to help us, the viewer, see our way clear of the cavernous despair that permeates this story. In a film filled with outrageously strong film-music moments, there are two particular stand-outs.

Number One. For the moment when Precious approaches Harlem's Hotel Theresa where her new alternative school is located, Daniels kicks in with a wide-eyed doe of a track called "Did You Ever Hear a Dream Talking?" written by Harry Revel and Mack Gordon. The song was popularized by Bing Crosby in the 1933 and Sunny Gale's version, used here, is even bouncier than the original. The fact that this upbeat, sugary number appears so unexpectedly in the midst of a soundtrack dominated by R&B, hip hop, and gospel artists is what makes it a sophisticated choice. Precious looks timidly up at the floor where her new school is located while Gale's impossibly cheerful voice asks, "Did you ever see a dream walking? Well, I did!" It really pops.

Number Two. (spoiler alert!) The second stand-out film-music moment is the best possible kind: one that has been so carefully and artfully crafted that it transcends even my usual definition of "film-music moment" and becomes an actual storytelling element in and of itself—woven into the very fabric of the film through careful interlacing of action and sound. I am talking, of course, about the climactic scene in which Precious' mother deliberately pushes Precious down a flight of stairs while she is cradling her newborn infant son, then throws a TV down after them. Sometime during this bone chilling series of events, the strains of "Soul Holiday"—a gospel Christmas song of all things—are folded into the action. "Time to celebrate," it begins, "our love for one another," a bitterly ironic choice at this point in the story, but as she ventures blindly out into the night, operating on pure instinct to protect her child, Precious sees a gospel choir practicing in a church and has a brief fantasy of singing with them. As "Soul Holiday" grows louder and more joyous over top the scene, we realize this is our protagonist's pivotal moment and that this song is the anthem of her Herculean feat: walking out on the abusive monster who was running (and ruining) her life. The fact that it's a Christmas song implies sacrifice and bravery on par with the biblical Mary and Daniels' choice may also refer to a coping strategy common to victims of abuse: an ability to flee their own bodies for brief periods of time to escape the harrowing reality of what's being done to them. The fantasy of practicing with that gospel choir is the visual symbol of Precious' decision to make a better life for herself. It is a brilliant, deeply layered sequence—one so perfect that it's hard to imagine it any other way, and especially with any other music. (I believe the version of the song that's used in the film is by the group Sounds of Blackness. <--YouTube link. )

Daniels has said that he really loves working with musicians—there were three prominent ones cast in roles in this film—and clearly he has a special feeling for music as a cinematic element on par with script, cast, photography, and everything else. I'd love to listen to his favorite records with him and hear him talk about why he loves them. Not many people, particularly filmmakers, think as deeply about music as he does.