"'Twas the night before Christmas...and all through the house..."
"Hold it now, wait, hold it....that's played out!!"
- vocal exchange at the beginning of Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'"
Last Saturday I DJed a Christmas party at the very swank La Residence. Whenever I'm DJing some sort of special event, I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself and I wind up doing more advance prep work than I do when I'm just DJing in a bar/club. Since this particular party was Christmas-related, I spent part of the the preceding week choosing a few good danceable Christmas tunes to play and trying to work out some ways to mix them into my whole set of music.
Along with classic Xmas tunes by Run-DMC and The Waitresses, "Christmas Rappin'" by Kurtis Blow was an obvious choice for the occasion. The interesting thing about "Christmas Rappin'" is that it wasn't just a typical Christmas record released by an established recording artist looking to capitalize on the sales of previous albums and singles. "Christmas Rappin'" was actually Blow's historic 1979 debut single, released only a mere few weeks after a song called "Rapper's Delight" took the world by storm. If "Rapper's Delight" had come out just a tad bit later than it did (in October 1979, only 4 months after "Good Times" was released!), "Christmas Rappin'" might be famously known as the "first" hip-hop record instead of just a Christmas novelty tune that gets broken out once a year and winds up fulfilling the prophecy of one of its own lyrics: "Every year just about this time, I celebrate it with a rhyme."
I'm not afraid to publicly admit that another one of my favorite Christmas jams is actually a certain million-selling single that was released 20 years ago this month. Yes, that guilty pleasure known as "Last Christmas" by Wham! Sure, those cheesy heartache-y lyrics are saturated with sappiness, but it's a really catchy song and I love the way that those synths bounce up and down on top of the primitive and gritty early-80s drum-machine beat. While listening to "Last Christmas" again a couple weeks ago I was struck by how the song might potentially mix well with some of the sparse 808-based hip-hop from the early Def Jam era. But I didn't really think that I ought to be busting out "Sucker MCs" or "It's Yours" at a nice Christmas party. So I just worked out a way to blend "Last Christmas" into the end of Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'", since the latter song is only a little bit faster tempo-wise.
And once I started counting the beats per minute for these songs, that's when the ridiculous idea hit me. "Last Christmas" is right around 107 BPM, and the damn thing is way too long - it's almost 7 minutes! So I pulled out my acappella copy of Jay-Z's "The Black Album" and tried mixing in the rap from "Encore", an uncharacteristically fast Jay-Z song that I remembered being in that same BPM range. And the damn thing fit almost perfectly. And I thought it sounded pretty good and pretty funny. So I did a primitive mix of it and I played it at both the Christmas party and another party that I DJed the next night. I think it went over pretty well but the sound quality was really bad and I wasn't at all happy with the mix. So I coughed up the license fee for Goldwave's Multiquence (screw ACID!) and spent much of yesterday mixing together a Wham!/Jay-Z mashup...with a little bit of "Ho Ho Ho" chanting at the end to accompany those Christmas sleigh bells. The MP3 version is 5.0 MB and you can download either the regular or curseword-free versions here:
Let me preemptively state for the record that I fully realize that the Jay-Z remix craze is pretty played at this point, and I'm sure that someone out there might scream and groan about this. Whatever, if you don't like my mashup, you can press fast forward. Or the back button. Don't worry, I have absolutely no intention of making "The Wham Album" or "Black Christmas" or anything like that. Consider this a one-time Christmas-themed encore to cap off 2004, which really was the year of Jay-Z remixes, for better or for worse. C'mon, this is Young H-O....one last time, make some noise!!
Besides, if any Scrooges out there really need something to hate on, they should be throwing lumps of coal at that godawful Jay-Z/Linkin Park crap that somehow made it to the top of the Billboard album charts....
Posted by Tim at December 25, 2004 02:19 AMRight on! I'll put on my boyfriend's iPod and check it out!
Posted by: Ruby at December 26, 2004 02:23 PMI was listening to my alma mater's radio station at work recently, and they had a theme on one show that seemed to be Christmas and Civil Rights. They played a really cool record from 1964 or thereabouts that had Christmas carols with the lyrics to reflect the Civil Rights Movement. But the best part was some Beatnik Night Before Christmas thing. It was very proto Christmas Rapping -- if you ever run across it (I can't give a citation, alas) I highly recommend checking it out.
Posted by: robin at December 27, 2004 11:21 PM