by Robert Lanham

It’s that time of the year again when new indie renditions of syrupy holiday songs are shared by music snobs who wouldn’t touch Harry Connick’s Auld Lang Syne with Michael Bublé’s Mele Kalikimaka. There are definitely some strong releases to be discovered including Sufjan Stevens’ latest holiday collection, Silver and Gold, though, admittedly, you’ll feel so twee listening to it you’ll hallucinate rainbow-colored snowmen. Still, do we really need to hear Arcade Fire cover “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” or Neon Vulva’s chillwave take on “Sleigh Ride?” Regrettably, most of the alternative holiday songs shared around this time of the year rival the traditional schlock in corniness.

Thankfully, there are plenty of classic recordings still to be discovered, ones that are less ubiquitous than the great stuff by Vince and Ella that you’ll burn out own while waiting in line at Bed Bath & Beyond. Here are a handful of under-the-radar classics to enjoy this year with your heavily spiked eggnog.

1. Kay Martin and Her Body Guards — I Know What He Wants For Christmas… (But I Don’t Know How to Wrap It!)
(Out of print.)

Kay Martin puts the X in Xmas. In the 50s and early 60s, this pin-up girl (whose career included an appearance in Playboy) turned lounge singer toured the country with her band the Body Guards. The popular nightclub act often sold their now hard-to-find “adult party albums” in the lobby after their shows. That’s not her on the cover, by the way (shown in the video here) — but a scantily clad picture of Martin does appear on the back sleeve, posted above her measurements: 38–24–36. The holiday songs here, like “Santa’s Doing the Horizontal Twist” are wonderfully sleazy and filled with kitschy double entendre: “he was a crazy twister, that fat friend of mine… he came down my chimney.” It’s out of print, but still available for download on many websites if you do a little Googling, WFMU’s Beware of the Blog digitized a few Kay Martin tracks including the fantastic “My Santa Daddy.” Evidently, Martin is still alive and runs a hotel called the Kay Martin Lodge just outside Reno.

2. Various Artists — Where Will You Be Christmas Day?
(Listen on Spotify.)

Where will I be? Hopefully not in jail like Leroy Carr in “Christmas in Jail — Ain’t that a Pain.” Nor in a gutter drinking corn whiskey with Lead Belly. Nor in a fire-and brimstone church handling snakes with Rev. J. M. James. Wherever I am, I hope to be listening to this wonderful compilation of old time Christmas gospel and blues tunes lovingly curated by Dust-to-Digital. Every track — with the exception of the album closer “Jingle Bells” — will be new to most listeners. If you’re looking for more old time blues Blues, Blues Christmas, is another great comp best enjoyed while drinking eggnog and rye from a paper bag.

3. James Brown — Santa’s Got a Brand New Bag
(Listen on Spotify.)

You’ll crack up hearing Brown screech “hit me Maceo” over holiday classics, but this compilation shouldn’t be lumped among all the other holiday novelty records out there, like the ones from Pet Shop Boys and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Star Wars one, or Afroman’s A Colt 45 Christmas — um, yes these exist. That’s because Brown’s holiday music is insanely listenable, even if it makes you smirk. Somehow, this masterpiece is out of print, but The Complete James Brown Christmas is still available, albeit with a few unnecessary tracks. For example, I’m still not sure why they included “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” on this release in lieu of the true holiday staple “Hotpants (She Got To Use What She Got To Get What She Wants).”

4. The Staple Singers — The 25th Day of December
(Listen on Spotify.)

Speaking of James Brown, remember that scene in The Blues Brothers when Elwood has a conversion experience? This gospel Christmas record could make a believer out of Richard Dawkins. One listen and you’ll want to confess your sinning ways and become a believer. You undoubtedly know the Staples from their 70s hit “I’ll Take You There,” but Roebuck, Cleotha, Pervis, Yvonne and Mavis (great names) are truly in their element singing gospel. This album is so good, the label can almost be forgiven for not including their best holiday song, “Who Took The Merry Out of Christmas.”

5. Duke Ellington — Three Suites
(Listen on Spotify.)

Finding a good jazz record for the holidays is tough. An Oscar Peterson Christmas is filled with trite classics made cornier by the ever-present cooing of the vibes, which is like having Splenda added to something that’s already too syrupy. There are some solid big band releases to be found, but most of them leave you feeling like you’re in a scene from The Shining. You could always opt for Spyro Gyra’s smooth fusion classic “A Night Before Christmas,” that is if you want to listen to the worst thing ever. Thankfully, there’s Duke Ellington’s Three Suites, whose first nine tracks are a reworking of The Nutcracker Suite with Ellington’s orchestra trading chops on Tchaikovsky’s familiar melodies. Highly recommended.

6. Leon Redbone — Christmas Island
(Listen on Spotify.)

All right, all right. This one’s got “Frosty” on it. But it’s a “Frosty” duet sung by two creepy hobos, Redbone and Dr. John. And fortunately, the album also contains some rarer tracks like “That Old Christmas Moon,” “Christmas Ball Blues,” and what has to be the best version of “Christmas Island” ever recorded — sorry, Ella, and fuck you, Jimmy Buffet. If you’re not familiar with Redbone, he sounds like a boozier Burl Ives (is that possible?) influenced by New Orleans jazz and ragtime. And speaking of “Frosty,” the video — which looks like it was recorded by the Redbone and Dr. John on a coke binge after robbing a train — is pretty priceless.

7. Various Artists — In the Christmas Groove

Let’s face it, most of Motown’s holiday recordings are pretty hokey. They haven’t aged well. (Sorry, Smokey, I’m going to pass on your “Feliz Navidad.”) Thankfully, Strut Records released this little holiday gem a few years ago. It’s packed with early 70s funk and soul — many tracks pulled from B-sides of tiny regional labels. Recorded by artists with names like A Black on White Affair and Zebra (I’m not making these up), many of the grooves could be straight out of Dolemite, and I mean that in the best way. Strut’s website says that even Santa is a fan: “This is the shit I want in my sleigh!” It’s a nice companion piece to the James Brown holiday record.

Robert “E.L. James” Lanham is the author of Fifty Shades of Grey.

★★★ A white wake cut through the blue, blue Hudson, under a clear morning sky. Light was everywhere, and so was the chill, both piercing the living room on the hypotenuse between the windows. Late sun came between the open slabs of a building under construction, glowing through the orange mesh on each story. A busker worked the corner in a sweater, leaning forward with a heavy-grained guitar. The sunset was a smooth, even wash of pink in the west. After dark, in the unobstructed sky by the building site on Amsterdam, the length of a don’t-walk signal was not enough time to glimpse any Geminids. But it was enough time to pick out the stars twinkling near the zenith. The signal changed. And then — something, or nothing, a flash of a white line segment, a streak on the celestial dome or simply a false impression on the inverted dome of the retina.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

The Stars, the Stars

Virtuosity conceding to virtue…

What relief. In strange arrangement, they pose
their difficulties, though what

they most seem is distance. Abstract
and relentless as killjoy thoughts, self-given

insults. Book of them entered again
and again. Like a wife, a poppy-

filled field for dreaming. They call, come out! I say,
you first. Hard, to punish

and pardon. For the strong and the weak — 
in jotted dark, the forgive and the me.

Paula Bohince is the author of two poetry collections, both from Sarabande Books: Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (2008) and The Children (2012).

You are not gonna believe just how much more poetry is waiting for you here in The Poetry Section’s archives. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

A weird little primate with a poisonous bite has been discovered in Borneo. We are still finding new primates! Of course, the creature is already threatened with extinction. Nycticebus kayan is a new species of slow loris. It looks kind of like a little bear with a striped demon face. So cute!

But the new loris is already under threat from the Asian pet trade in part because its “teddy-bear face” make it attractive for illegal poaching, the team of UK and US scientists said.

So, animal trappers working for exotic pet stores in Asia found this new lemur-like venomous creature before the biologists managed to identify it. Why do people want to keep rare wild animals as “pets,” again? Because people are awful. At least there’s a chance this new kind of slow loris creature can kill its human jailers with its bite, while the humans sleep.

Here is the donation page for the Brady Campaign, or you could become a monthly giver.

by Mike Barthel

A promo ad for this album says it all: “EDDIE MURPHY SINGS!!! / ‘HOW COULD IT BE’ ?!?” Nine years after Richard Pryor’s …Is It Something I Said? held the number-one spot on the R&B; charts for two consecutive weeks, only one of Murphy’s first two albums, both recordings of his stand-up act, had squeaked its way into the top ten of that chart.

Though comedy LPs by Bill Cosby, Steve Martin, and Bob Newhart had been major commercial successes in the 60s and 70s, by the early 80s, audiences were turning to movies, TV, and video rental for their standup needs. (Pryor’s landmark 1982 concert Live on the Sunset Strip was #1 at the box office, for instance, but only made it to #13 on the R&B; charts.) And so for his third album, Murphy got some of his friends together and launched himself into the revenue stream then ascendant: R&B; albums. Rick James co-wrote and sang on the lead single “Party All the Time,” as you may remember from the tales Charlie Murphy, Eddie’s older brother, shared on “Chappelle’s Show.” The resulting album, How Could It Be, was both an exercise in vanity and astoundingly successful at being the thing it was aspiring to, which was a mid-80s electro-pop megahit. Nearly two decades later, Charlie Murphy’s tales of “Party” are emblematic of its legacy as a reliable go-to for making fun of the 80s. But there’s much more to the album, from Stevie Wonder playing harmonica to sensitive ballads about racial harmony. Does it deserve critical reconsideration?

THE SONGS: Eddie had always pursued music alongside his comedy, fronting an R&B; band as a teenager back in Queens and doing backup vocals for the Bus Boys, a vocal group who appeared in 48 Hours. He included two parody songs on his first, self-titled comedy album — the Grandmaster Flash-goofing “Boogie in Your Butt” and “Enough is Enough,” an almost indescribably embarrassing play on Donna Summer and Barbara Streisand’s disco master class “No More Tears (Enough is Enough).” But you know he’s up to something different here about 30 seconds into the Stevie Wonder-penned opener “Do I.” After an extended intro of Seinfeldian synth-bass pops and guitar strums (that sound, to modern ears, remarkably like an iPhone’s “Strum” ringtone), Murphy coos, “Do I, do I, do I love you…” This is serious Eddie, trading the sexual aggression and rapid-fire mockery of his comedy for vulnerability and romance. If the only song you’re familiar with from the album is “Party All the Time” (and why would it be any other way?), the mellow tone of the rest of the tracks may come as a surprise. They were produced by Stevie Wonder’s cousin, a man named Aquil Fudge, and occasionally featured Stevie himself playing harmonica. There is a song, written by Murphy, called “My God Is Color Blind” which Eddie sings in a pained falsetto, and this song is far more typical of the album than “Party.”

DID IT SELL? Very well: the album went to #26 on the overall Billboard chart, Eddie’s highest ever (although due to the vagaries of Billboard’s system, it did worse on the R&B; charts, reaching a peak 7 spots lower than he did on Comedian). “Party” hit #2 on the singles chart, tragically (yet appropriately) held off from #1 by Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me,” the mere humming of which has been shown to induce spontaneous soft-focus vision and slow-motion hair-flipping in bystanders within a fifteen-foot radius.

CURRENT AVAILABILITY: Available on iTunes as we speak.

SKETCHINESS OF LABEL: Like Murphy’s standup albums, it was released on the mega-major Columbia.

WHO HELPED HIM MAKE IT: I can’t tell you much about the aforementioned Aquil Fudge, who is so little-documented that when the album came out both Billboard and an LA Times letter-writer erroneously assumed this was a pseudonym for Murphy himself. (In retrospect, the idea that Murphy was vain enough to want credit for performing and writing but so modest that he demurred at taking credit for producing does seem ridiculous.) But more than any individual, the free-floating musical environment of R&B; at the time was most responsible for the album’s content. Scan the charts and you’ll find a whole bunch of superstars who shared personnel with Murphy, from Hall & Oates and Marvin Gaye to Eric Clapton and David Bowie. Bassist Fred Washington co-wrote “Forget Me Nots,” which you may be familiar with as “that Men in Black song.” Two years later, Murphy blamed “egos” for the lack of famous guests aside from James on the album (Prince had been a rumored collaborator) and says that the fantastic Mr. Fudge “wasn’t that familiar with the recording equipment we used.” Who would’ve thought that making an album with Stevie Wonder’s cousin would be a bad move!

WHEN HE MADE IT: Eddie Murphy is a hard man to like nowadays, but, in 1985, he was wildly popular. Beverly Hills Cop had been a blockbuster just the year before, following on the heels of the hits 48 Hours and Trading Places. Still, resistance had begun to brew. Two years before, gay rights activists launched the “Eddie Murphy’s Disease Foundation” in reaction to Murphy’s sizable and reprehensible stable of jokes about AIDS and gays. “Too many people were confusing ‘homophobia’ with other diseases, like hemophilia,” the activists write in their pamphlet, “so from now on let’s just call it Eddie Murphy’s Disease.” (He later apologized for all the gay-bashing; it was not particularly convincing.) A 1988 profile in People, written with the release of Coming to America, the movie that would turn out to be the first step in his box-office decline, catches him at a slightly more paranoid place than he was during the making of How Could It Be, but the personality shines through. He says of a fairly complimentary Elvis Mitchell piece that had run in Interview the year before, “I was raped” — and this was a quote that made it into People magazine, the most sympathetic forum for celebrities in the known universe.

How Could It Be was made in the eye of a storm of personal problems that would inform Murphy’s late-80s persona, especially as it was expressed in his 1987 concert Raw. Mentions of paternity suits, real-estate scams, drugs, and nasty business disputes of all cast and character litter any discussion of Murphy’s career during this period. Some of it (the drugs, the money problems) are understandable territory for a guy who’d gotten massively successful at a young age, ricocheting from the then-edgy SNL to making three of the highest-grossing movies of the decade. But the romantic problems were Murphy’s own. The People piece repeats the rumor (more-or-less confirmed in the Chappelle skit) that Murphy would send underlings to clubs to recruit one-night stands. A couple paternity suits followed. The most recent suit was brought by ex-girlfriend, and ex-Spice Girl, Melanie Brown, whose daughter Angel was confirmed to be Murphy’s, though he’s refused to have any contact. Most notoriously, in 1997, while he was married to Nicole Mitchell, Murphy was pulled over by police while out with a transvestite prostitute. Murphy, saying he was only helping out a stranger with a ride home, blamed insomnia.

During this period, Murphy seemed to pick up and discard sexual partners at a frequency greater even than that of other superstars, and he did not treat them kindly. Yet romantic yearning is at the heart of How Could it Be. People quotes Murphy’s friend Arsenio Hall on Murphy’s dating history: “On the first date Eddie will say, ‘Oh, man! Isn’t she wonderful? That’s the next Miz Murphy!’ He wants Cinderella so bad.” And indeed, there’s a yearning for companionship that runs through Murphy’s contributions to the album, one starkly different from the aggressive lothario persona he adopts in his standup.

THE MUSIC: “Yeah, a lot of it turned out bad,” Murphy said of How Could It Be in that 1987 Elvis Mitchell piece. He’s not wrong. Murphy, dreaming of being a star singer as long as he’d dreamed of being a famous comedian, committed the cardinal sin of vanity projects: assuming your undeniable talent in one area will carry over to another area just because you care about and have worked at both areas equally much. It’s clear that Eddie Murphy really wanted to be a serious, respected R&B; singer. But some people have good voices for singing, and some people have good voices for comedy, and rarely do the twain meet. Murphy’s is solidly a comedic voice, and a great one. But the Lionel Richie-like croon he adopts on many of How’s tracks sounds like nothing more than the take from an audition that makes everyone in the control booth exchange disappointed and slightly pained glances. Anyone else would’ve been politely shown the door; Murphy got a gold record. On the bright side, it’s only a half-hour long.

None of this is to deny the magnificence of “Party All the Time,” however. As a song by Eddie Murphy, it’s less than ideal, given that everything we know about Eddie Murphy tends to dismiss the dissatisfaction expressed of girls who indulge in recreational activities with the frequency much-protested in the song’s chorus. But as an 80s synth-pop single, there is not a single thing to complain about. It’s ironic, goofy, and insanely tuneful. Murphy’s weak voice ultimately prevents it from being a vocal-driven egofest, letting the crazy groove and melody dominate. “Party All the Time” is a four-minute loop of pleasure that could be endless, if you want it to be, Rick James whispering in your ear, the bass bouncing along, the chorus occasionally circling back into view. Sometimes the context matters less than the beat.

Previously: Brian Austin Green’s “Beverly Hills 90210”-Era Rap Album

Mike Barthel has a Tumblr.

Finally, one of the millions of video-equipped smart phones in Brooklyn have caught an unidentified flying object hovering over some of the world’s priciest real estate. Why do the alien monsters want to live where everyone else wants to live?

It is not a coincidence that similar formations of eerie lights are also being seen (and video recorded) over the Mission District in San Francisco. And there’s video of that, too.

In both videos, the voices of the observers are perfect for their respective neighborhoods. In the Brooklyn clip, various semi-stoned people express their amazement while a woman about a half block away is shouting, again and again, that these ain’t no Chinese lanterns. Perhaps it is truly the right time for the White House to begin work on a Death Star.

And in the above clip from 16th and Valencia at the heart of the incredibly expensive barrio, it sounds basically like Marc Zuckerburg saying “dude?!” and “what is that?!” repeatedly while others mutter in Spanish.

Have you seen these black triangles of eerie and potentially alien lights? Are they surveillance drones or Chinese lanterns or maybe hundred dollar bills the rich are setting on fire and letting float away with the chilly winds?

“There are many chemicals out there — and new ones being produced all the time — that we don’t know the effects of. But when it comes to mercury, we know where it comes from, we know where it ends up, we know what the human effects are. Now we have to think about whether we want to do anything about that.”
 — Marine scientist Celia Chen, discussing a new report on why fish are full of mercury, has the adorable idea that we might actually give some thought to reducing our emissions to help reduce those levels.

Good news from the current “former marijuana smoker” in the White House: Barack Obama has finally (and vaguely) said that his administration will not make it a “priority” to prosecute people who legally use marijuana in the western states of Colorado and Washington. Voters there approved recreational weed in the November election, and since then the U.S. Justice Department has continued its weird, threatening rumblings. (States with legal medicinal pot have seen increased prosecution of legal growers and dispensaries during Obama’s first term.)

“It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that’s legal,” he told ABC News in part of an interview released on Friday.

“At this point (in) Washington and Colorado, you’ve seen the voters speak on this issue. And, as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions,” Obama said.

Obama is the third consecutive president to be a known recreational user of marijuana. But so far, only coastal-elite Republican-lite leaders like Michael Bloomberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger have had the personal dignity to admit they enjoyed the use of the commonplace plant.

Photo by Chris Yarzab

The wonderful news that NASA is deliberately crashing two space probes into the moon is tempered somewhat by the fact that this is actually an attempt to be a more careful steward of that useless satellite’s surface. While we have been using the moon as a garbage dump for years — because that’s the only thing it’s good for — now the agency is concerned that the junk we quite rightly chuck onto that stupid rock might “come to rest in a historically significant place, like on Neil Armstrong’s footprints.” You can IMAGINE how I feel about that. PAVE THE WHOLE GODDAMN THING ALREADY.