give-a give-a give-a Garmin

I woke up about fifteen minutes ago and turned the Redskins game on. Since then the following entities have used “The Carol of the Bells” to try to sell me things:

• Garmin
• Wal-mart
• Hyundai
• Verizon
• Hyundai, again

In general, I don’t really mind having beloved parts of our shared culture appropriated by the great campaign to sell me injection-molded plastic from Shengzhou. But I am going to have to insist on a little more variety. Why so much “Carol of the Bells”? I suppose it’s got secular lyrics, which discourages the religious crazies from writing letters about how Jesus dislikes crass materialism and would prefer that we save our money for war with Iran. But mostly I think it’s because it’s one of the most lonely, haunting holiday songs, if not because of how it sounds then at least because it was used to that effect in Home Alone. This makes people think about sitting alone in the fading light of a winter day, left to wonder where their family is. Wouldn’t you rather spend that time carefully reading the manual to your new GPS unit?

Whatever happened to all those Gap ads where shame-faced musicians would listlessly plod through rocked-up carols? I need some more of those. I know Gap’s been facing some financial trouble, but I’d be willing to write my congressman about a federal bailout if only they’d promise to get, say, My Chemical Romance to tear through an emo version of Handel’s Messiah.

At any rate, here’s the only version of “Carol of the Bells” that I actually want to see on my television:

It’s even better than the version of “We Three Kings” with the swingin’ camels. I could’ve sworn those camels moonwalked, but YouTube disagrees.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 1:20 pm and is filed under music, pop culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.