Happy Christmas Your Arse
How does one know Christmas is approaching? Among the many harbingers: red and green lights begin to bedeck the streets of cities and towns, tinsel-adorned trees are erected in living rooms, and the sentimental adverts produced by corporations, all aiming to seduce us into opening our wallets, flicker endlessly across our television screens.
And then there is the music. ‘Last Christmas’, ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’, ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’, etc, etc, etc. Some of this can be tiresome, but I’m not actually all that cynical when it comes down to it. I mostly enjoy the season and have always looked forward to Christmas Day. Despite the gross sentimentality and the irritating adverts and the endless loop of time-“hallowed” Christmas songs, I’m more than happy to join in with the fun. I’m even one of those atheists who enjoy old-fashioned Christmas carols (I haven’t yet had the chance to attend a carol service, though I’d quite like to).
The religious origins of Christmas (celebrating the birth of a human destined to be tortured and slaughtered for the incoherent—not to mention morally disgusting—purpose of delivering others from sin) and the cloying, commercialized nature of its modern form—well, these are not quite enough to put me off. We all know how much Christmas owes to older religious rituals, and we all enjoy the booze and festivity of the Christmas period, so who cares about the Christians or the corporations? Let them have at it, for all I care.
Daniel's Den is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Christmas, for me, has always been a secular and a humanistic celebration, a spell of time in midwinter dedicated to enjoying the warmth of friends and family. Of course, this is something we should enjoy throughout the year, but it’s nice to have a particular season in which it is really taken to heart, and in which busy lives can be laid aside and replaced with merrymaking and carousing (as well as carolling).
But to confess a love of Christmas is not my purpose here. I want to return to the harbingers of Christmas. For me, the chief indication that the festive season has finally come is the annual controversy over the 1987 song ‘Fairytale of New York’. I’m not sure how much time I need to spend explaining ‘Fairytale’, as I’ll refer to it, because it is so ubiquitous, but a little bit of background and recapitulation, with some analysis mixed in, shouldn’t hurt too much—and it’s all in aid of a bigger point.
‘Fairytale’ was written by Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan and sung by MacGowan and the late Kirsty MacColl. It’s undoubtedly the Pogues’ most well-known song. It begins slowly and, yes, sentimentally, with MacGowan (I’ll use the singers’ names to denote the song’s characters) lamenting the difficult times he and his lover (MacColl) have faced while expressing a hope that they will soon reunite and perfect bliss will be attained, per every schmaltzy Christmas movie ever made.1
And then the fun begins: the music speeds up, céilidh-style, and MacGowan and MacColl, after a last burst of affection in the form of fond recollection, proceed to undermine the sentimentality of the opening by hurling verses of vulgar abuse at each other. This story, we soon discover, is not the stuff of Hallmark. No, this is a tale of two pissed and/or high Celts in New York City; the evocation is of a couple screaming at each other on the street late at night, blaming each other for the thwarting of their dreams: as real an image as you’ll find in a Christmas song.2 All of this is neatly presaged in the opening with MacGowan’s statement that he’s “in the drunk tank”. (Indeed, part of the brilliance of the song, and one of the reasons for its abiding power, is that it echoes life by lacing and interweaving the contradictory and the complex throughout, rather than contriving to divvy up discordant feelings by ‘section’.)
But if it were judged only by its slightly mushy opening and its descent into vulgarity, ‘Fairytale’ wouldn’t be of much more than ephemeral interest (oh yes, well done, you subverted our expectations there, didn’t you?).
No, the song’s true genius lies in its ending, in which MacGowan and MacColl reaffirm and reassert their love without a hint (or at least no more than a hint, given that it is “the bells…ringing out for Christmas Day” that constitute the song’s motif3 ) of sappiness.
By first undercutting the initial mushiness and then validating the idea of love (in a beautifully vulnerable fashion, evoking the failed promises of young love and young dreams) after a great outburst of rawness and coarseness and snarling resentment (or perhaps because of it), and all the while displaying a disquieting awareness of the fragility and finitude of life and the unavoidably brute fact of mortality, ‘Fairytale’ transcends the mawkish genre of the Christmas song.
This is why it is one of those rare products of that genre that is worthwhile in itself as a piece of art4, and why it transcends the festive period, and why it survives even the relentless repetition of it throughout that period by radio stations and whoever it is who chooses supermarket background music.
By rising above their tawdry, banal argument, MacGowan and MacColl find a kind of redemption in the end. The song is democratic, both in evoking a certain street realism and by transcending it without losing sight of the everyday and the all too human. Most of all, as anyone who has sung along to it at closing time in a bar during December (myself included) will attest, it is just great fun.
And so we come back, finally, to the annual controversy. In the song, MacColl calls MacGowan a “cheap, lousy faggot”, and much agonising over the use of this slur has accompanied its festive appearance for as long as I can remember (at least from on high; I haven’t noticed any reticence to use it in bar and club sing-alongs, though I suppose some will say that this is just because straights are enjoying some kind of implicit permission to act out the homophobia that lurks deep within all their horrid heterosexual hearts).
Other lines and words, too, have shocked the innocent: “an old slut on junk” and “Happy Christmas your arse” in particular, but the focus in recent years seems to be on “faggot”. In fact, as early as 1992, MacColl replaced “faggot” with “haggard” to avoid offence (it’s interesting that, in 2005, Katie Melua in her rendition changed “arse” but not “faggot”. How times and sensitivities change. I shall refrain from joking about any possible connection between those two words).
Some admirers of the song have come to its defence by arguing that “faggot” is a slang word for the indolent in Irish and Liverpudlian argot. This seems irrelevant to me. Yes, “faggot” is a horrible word. But horribleness is what gives the song its piss and vinegar, and it is essential to the song’s claim to be a genuine work of art. The whole point of the song, as I have laboured to say, is that vulgarity need not preclude, can even encompass and inspire, transcendence and nobility5, and how can one make this point so forcefully without injecting some true nastiness? Whether “faggot” in this context means lazy bastard or gay boy, then, just doesn’t matter, and its use is defensible in either and any case. “Haggard”, I’m afraid, just won’t do it.
And yes, I am of course sensitive to the use of slurs. I am, myself, a confirmed “faggot” (in both the general and Irish/Liverpudlian senses). I can’t speak for all my fellows here (and I don’t want to rely on identitarian justifications anyway) but gays, at least the very many who aren’t as wilting as the stereotype would have it, are wont to jokily use “fag” or “faggot” in conversation. Disregarding that, I find myself unwilling to dilute what I believe to be a great piece of art in the name of sensitivity. To the horrendously offended, I can only say: too bad, and perhaps try thinking about the actual meaning(s) of the song instead.
The same goes for just about every newly-offensive artwork. People are upset by the use of “nigger” in Mark Twain and, more recently, in Quentin Tarantino movies.6 And once more, “nigger” is obviously a vile word. But to get upset about these uses is to miss the point: Twain and Tarantino are anti-racists in their art. (How can one make a movie about slavery and about the vengeance of a former slave upon the whites who have so immiserated and exploited him and his fellow Africans, and here I’m thinking of Tarantino’s excellent film Django Unchained, and not include “nigger” in the dialogue? To do so would betray not only verisimilitude but the whole spirit of attacking racism in the first place—by attenuating its awfulness.)
In the end, if a word, however disgusting, is essential to a piece of art, never mind when it is used in the service of opposing the bigotry behind said word, then we must not censor it, even if it upsets us. So while the annual controversy around ‘Fairytale of New York’ bores us all yet again, I recommend you tune out the cries of the offended and just listen to the song and enjoy it.
And so, and with genuine goodwill, let me finish by wishing all you cheap, lousy faggots a Happy Christmas (I shall, in the spirit of the season, be kind and omit any mention of your arses).
Incidentally, MacGowan makes reference to an old Irish folk song called ‘The Rare Old Mountain Dew’ in the opening, a song which was once covered by the Pogues. So there is an element of self-referentiality in ‘Fairytale’, too.
‘Fairytale’ is also, obviously, a New York song: first the enchantment of (and by) that astonishing city, and then the disillusionment—and finally the mature reconciliation and the flowering of a deeper and richer passion. This is the course of true love, too, perhaps.
And, by the way, notice that the tense concerning those bells changes from “were” to “are” by song’s end.
I can’t help but also add, in aid of undermining the horribly sentimental, that MacGowan in 2015 declared that “I don't like Christmas—I think it's gross.”
In this judgement, I differ from MacGowan himself, who in 1985 (and before its release) described ‘Fairytale’ as “quite sloppy, more like 'A Pair of Brown Eyes' than 'Sally MacLennane'.” Then again, MacGowan did also evince some awareness of the song’s greatness in the same interview: “there's also a céilidh bit in the middle which you can definitely dance to… [It] is quite depressing in the end, it's about these old Irish-American Broadway stars who are sitting round at Christmas talking about whether things are going okay.” But here, also, I dissent from the author (or co-author), as it were, in that I think the song is ultimately, and deeply, life-affirming. You may, if you wish, consider that opinion a tribute to Roland Barthes. (But note that this interview was given a good while before the song’s release and that the song was still undergoing the process of creation at the time; perhaps some changes or additions along the lines of transcendence and nobility were made in the intervening period?)
Here’s another attempt to summarise the genius of this song: it lies in the contrast between and combination of the profane and the sacred, or, rather, in how it describes the achievement of transcendent love by and through the profane, without losing sight of—in fact, and above all, unashamedly embracing—it (the profane, I mean).
There have been more than a few cases in recent years of people being cancelled by those who are ignorant (probably wilfully) of the use-mention distinction for daring to write or utter the dreaded “N-word”. Why do we let such words take on these lives of their own, as if they possess some kind of magic (I shan’t refer to “black magic”) power?