A Short List of Conscious Music for the Season

Preface: I do not celebrate Christmas, at least not the observance of 25 December. Nochebuena (24 December) and Día de Los Reyes (Three Kings Day, 6 January) are cultural holidays that are holidays of the heart.

And in my choice of commemoration, I also acknowledge the contributions of Christmas songs that put forth strong political words amid a broad spectrum of sounds that provoke thinking and dancing. 

Perhaps the most familiar of the genre-diverse list is "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" by John Lennon & Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band featuring the Harlem Community Choir. Rightly so, and the message resonates over five decades since its release. For reasons I plan to tell in a future posting, I would argue that Lennon was right to say “War is over if you want it.”

The song remains a staple of Christmas radio, even if the context is lost amid waves of recordings in heavy rotation beginning each November that feels less like music or celebration and more like psyops.  It’s as well a part of a large array of tunes for peace, justice, and national pride (the liberatory kind) and against poverty, war, oppression, and even capitalism. This is a small list and there are no links included to avoid the risk of broken link headaches later (in the World Wide Web, 404 is an unlucky number). The only exception is the website of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, as the podcast of the program discussed is easily available for Universal Holiday Season listening. New wave, psychedelic soul, r&b, salsa, progressive rock, and folk are represented here.

There’s no particular order to the songs except perhaps as they flow together. It is not, and should never be, an exhaustive list. 

In the antiwar tradition, “Stop the Cavalry” (1980) by Jona Lewie is sung from the perspective of a soldier longing to be with his beloved, mixing synths with marching band instrumentation. The track has an amazing anachronism combination: World Wars One & Two and a line about a “nuclear fallout shelter.”

A survivor of war - namely, in Vietnam - is given a shout out in “Christmas Love” (1967) by the Rotary Connection. Sung as a dialogue between Minnie Riperton‘ [“Loving You”] and Sidney Barnes, the love is extended to a multiracial coalition of survivors of urban US poverty and may be one of very few that acknowledges American Indians.

Speaking of acknowledgment, “Canto a Borinquen” (1971) by Willie Colón featuring Héctor Lavoe is a first a paean to Puerto Rico and its people, at home and abroad. It’s also spun every December and the week before Día de Los Reyes (Three Kings Day) and therefore a holiday favorite, in case the album title Asalto Navideño (Christmas Assault) is an insufficient clue.

Holiday traditions figure in “I Believe in Father Christmas” (1975) by Greg Lake (Emerson, Lake & Palmer). It is opposed to the commercialization of the holiday. In the video for the song, Lake performs amid scenes of Egypt and Palestine juxtaposed by in-your-face footage of war as the chorus wails in the orchestral version. A bonus is the B-side, a one-word lyric called “Humbug.” In the following and final mention here, the word is given incredibly rich context.

Finally, A Red Carol (2020) by the San Francisco Mime Troupe (www.sfmt.org) is a radio play (for the pandemic, this became the mode of their theatrical productions) that is a literally radical and fourth-wall smashing retelling of A Christmas Carol that lampshades much of what is familiar about the story, including the word “humbug,” which Michael Gene Sullivan as narrator (and in character as Bob Cratchit) describes as meaning a con.

Labor songs are at the core of this take: including “The Banks Are Made of Marble” and, what is perhaps a first, a medley of “O Tannenbaum” and “The Red Flag,” the latter of which has its own tune, but became better known for having taken on the tune of the former.

¡Enjoy! And all the best in the Universal Holiday Season.