9:58 - Disclaimer. Even though I photoshopped this, I’m not a Hills fan. But my roommate Dan is. Dan not only watches The Hills, he watches The Hills Aftershow, where a panel dissects the episode that just aired as if it’s a Thomas Pynchon novel. And now he’s watching the new Hills spinoff, The City, popcorn and all, so here we go.
Happy Holdiays and New Year from all the writers on the site. (We all chipped in and got Belinkie a copy of The Wire.)
We’ll be on holiday hiatus until the new year, and doing a little technical housekeeping in the meantime. We’ll still be updating the Twitter feed and recording the podcast (iTunes link), but you won’t see a new post until 2009. Unless there’s a really good Gossip Girl or something.
One thing grates on my nerves more than the the egregious examples of poor usage and idiocy I have tackled in this series: When people correct others incorrectly or, more bluntly, when people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and are snobs about it.
Case in point: “Xmas.” The nuns who taught my father in Catholic elementary school would rail against this abbreviation, claiming that it was a sacrilege worse than claiming you’re bigger than Jesus or something.
Apparently, they couldn’t be bothered to look in a dictionary. Here’s the American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed., 2000):
Xmas has been used for hundreds of years in religious writing, where the X represents a Greek chi, the first letter of , “Christ.” In this use it is parallel to other forms like Xtian, “Christian.” [Or Xtina. —Ed.]
But people unaware of the Greek origin of this X often mistakenly interpret Xmas as an informal shortening pronounced (ksms). Many [idiots] therefore frown upon the term Xmas because it seems to them a commercial convenience that omits Christ from Christmas.
OK, I added “idiots” in the paragraph above. But the dictionary wasn’t being snarky enough.
A funny postscript: As an adult, my dad decided, nuns be damned, he was going to write “Xmas”, figuring that because the letter “X” is cruciform it is an acceptable symbol of Christianity. This is an example of speculative folk etymology, something I’ve taken upbefore. Though you have to admire the brand integration: X, chi, the cross — they do all seem to fit together.
An odd element of hip-hop’s ascendancy is that despite its mainstream appeal and mass audience, the genre has injected many “urban” and non-standard themes into the discourse without experience a mutual equilibrium, absorbing more of the standard fare with which it now mingles.
While this insight is generally correct, it is also an oversimplification of the multiplicity of ways in which hip hop engages with the popular culture. In reality there is a spectrum, varying from a very simple incorporation of pop cultural tropes as the building blocks for rhymes to a more complex negotiation and two-way assimilation of mainstream practices and discourses and subcultural identities and meanings. Although this tension has played over the nearly 30 year history of the genre, it is encapsulated in the surprisingly wide variety of hip hop Christmas songs that have appeared throughout the years.
A brief tour through three common hip hop holiday tropes (and no shortage of ho, ho, hoes), after the jump.
[Today, December 24, 2008, is ChristmasMusic Day on OTI. Here's a holiday guest post from Trevor Siegler. Let us know what you think in the comments! —Ed.]
Christmas is in the air, and that means one thing: Christmas music is back and in full force. No other season has as many songs written about it, and it’s almost like Satan sets his iPod on shuffle every year.
Many songs simply suck the Christmas spirit out of you, especially if you’re stuck in a customer-service job where it’s piped in 24/7 between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.
But there are some holiday tunes that rise above the pack, some golden nuggets in a field full of overdone horse manure. I’ll keep the disgusting metaphors to a minimum and simply list the six seasonal songs that always fill me with Christmas spirit no matter how often “Jingle Bells” is on repeat.
Popular musicians all belong to one of two categories: those that record Christmas songs, and those that don’t. A few examples:
Winger has a Christmas song: a fantastically bad cover of “Happy Xmas (War is Over).” Metallica does not.
Weezer has several Christmas songs, including a great version of “O Holy Night.” Radiohead does not.
R. Kelly has a Christmas song: “World Christmas.” It’s no “Trapped in the Closet,” but it’s totally passable. Kanye West does not, but someone else clearly has thought that he should:
So what do Metallica, Radiohead, and Kanye West all have in common, besides their lack of Christmas music and the fact that they all take themselves too seriously? Are they all Jewish?
Obviously, some musicians would object to Christmas music on religious grounds (e.g., the Beastie Boys, Matisyahu), but that reason aside, I suppose some “artists” see themselves as above the crass commercialism and cheesiness of Christmas music. That’s all fine and good, but I think the world deserves to hear Thom Yorke give us his rendition of “Blue Christmas.”
Christmas Talmud? Oy vey. That’s our awkward way of wishing you a Happy Overthinking It Holiday Season. Let’s take a deeper look at John Lennon’s protest/ Christmas song, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” Since the meaning behind this song is already well known–it’s a protest against the Vietnam War–I’m going to use this as an opportunity to examine this song as an example of “earony.”
There is no TV with enough pixels to rival the experience of watching a great movie in an actual movie theater. Sorry Samsung, it’s true. I first figured this out when Fenzel and I went to see Superman at a midnight showing years ago. I grew up with that movie, and knew it backwards and forwards… but I’d only ever seen it on VHS. Sitting in a real movie theater, hearing the John Williams score, and seeing that “S” logo ten feet tall completely floored me.
Anyway, last week, I got the chance to see It’s a Wonderful Life projected from a real print. It was scratched as hell and barely audible at times, and I still cried like a baby for at least a third of it. And I also managed to notice a few things to Overthink™.
The struggling cellphone/PDA maker Palm has a new ad campaign for this holiday season: “Santa’s Gone Centro“:
Notice how Santa’s changed:
Close cropped facial hair
Skinny
Aviator sunglasses
Knows how to DJ
Walks around town with an unconventional pet
Pasty white complexion (okay, I guess that part hasn’t really changed)
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, Santa’s gone hipster. Looks like Palm didn’t get the message that Hipsterism is dead.
Still, I do give credit to Palm in that a Centro is a fine phone choice for a hipster who cares about irony in his choice of gadgets. If a hipster’s goal is to ironically appreciate things that mainstream society finds little worth in (the aforementioned Thundercats t-shirts from the thrift store, trucker hats, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer), then s/he would do well with a Centro. It runs on the hopelessly dated Palm OS platform, it lacks Wi-Fi, and worst of all, the touch screen requires a stylus to navigate. Remember the stylus? Didn’t think so.
So kudos to Palm for cornering the market that ironically appreciates mediocre smartphone hardware. But what I really want to know is, what kind of gifts does Hipster Santa (excuse me, “Claüs,” with an umlaut) give to the good little hipster boys and girls for Christmas?
9:58 - Disclaimer. Even though I photoshopped 
, “Christ.” In this use it is parallel to other forms like Xtian, “Christian.” [Or Xtina. —Ed.]
ks
m
s). Many [idiots] therefore frown upon the term Xmas because it seems to them a commercial convenience that omits Christ from Christmas.
