First things first. Forget everything you know about the song. Forget that crap about hanging stars on the highest bough, and our troubles being out of sight. No, no, no, no, there will be none of that. And I’m talking about the original version, with a young Judy Garland singing on the soundtrack to Meet Me in St. Louis.
Next, put aside your inability to deal with subtleties. This isn’t Jimmy Eat World or Alkaline Trio, so you’re not going to get smacked in the head by a slit wrist. The songwriters did this crazy thing where they actually trusted the listener to pick up on a couple of key words, so you need to pay attention.
[youtube]cC9o4oYMIqI[/youtube]
Before you press play, you should accept that this was recorded more than a decade before Elvis stole rock and roll from all the black guys who did the same thing, did it better, and didn’t get paid for it. There’s some crazy ass vibrato on her voice, and she sings like a character from an early Disney movie. Deal with it.
And you, the homophobic dude who’s lurking back there in the corner: listening to Judy Garland doesn’t make you gay. The latent desire to suck tons of cock makes you a homosexter, not Judy. And, shit, of course you’re gay already, or else you wouldn’t be so damned scared of them queers.
Okay, I think you’re finally ready to listen. You’ll need to find Judy Garland’s original version from Meet Me in St. Louis. Make sure you don’t listen to one of the awful versions that she recorded later, because she was obviously too ignorant to recognize a good thing when she sang it.
Check out the line, “Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.” That’s nice. Next year. Next year, things will be good. Next year, there won’t be any trouble. Right now, however, life is totally fucked. Not only are our troubles in sight this year, but they are on top of us like the dude in that Mew song.
The middle of the song has a bunch of stuff about how things might once again be how they used to be. It’s all good, but let’s jump to the last few lines: “Someday soon we all will be together / If the fates allow / Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” My God, this is better than going off of Prozac! Somehow, some way, we will muddle through another year (or six) until things get good again. Somehow, someday soon, life will be A-OK. And watch out for The Fates, who may or may not break our kneecaps. In the meantime, it’s going to suck harder than a hooker in need of heroin on Christmas morning.
As a semi-professional muddler and an aspiring curmudgeon, I’m always waiting for “someday soon.” I know that, someday soon, I’ll be excited to go to the mall and partake in rampant consumerism without giving a shit about the socioeconomic implications of my spending. Someday soon, I’ll be excited to throw 20 years of vegetarianism out the window and eat a bigass turkey with a bunch of family members who I don’t even like**. Someday soon, I’ll be stoked to buy a light-up manger scene and stick a big baby Jesus (not that kind) on my front lawn.
Until then, I’m going to turn down the lights and eat my nachos and dig on watching Jimmy Stewart peer into the abyss. And this year, I think I’m going to ask Ms. Judy to sing me a sweet little song about someday soon.
* Without Chris Willman’s 12/15/2006 article, “There’s Something About Merry,” in Entertainment Weekly, I never would have made this discovery. Thanks, Chris.
** I’m taking some poetic license here. I like all of my family members quite a lot, at least all of the ones who are not schizophrenic and/or institutionalized for being homicidal maniacs.
2 Responses
The way Karen Carpenter sang it was both beautiful and sad. You put on the Carpenter Christmas and you just want to open a bottle of scotch and drink the holiday away. What’s even sadder? On the same album is “Merry Christmas Darling”. For being the all american kids from Whittier, California, the underlying theme to their music was always tinged with sadness. Excuse me while I wipe away my tears in cyber-privacy.