Office Hours

Best Christmas Carol Ever?

Last week my pal Jeff Tweedy wrote a beautiful post over at his great Substack, Starship Casual, about The Pogues, the loss and funeral of Shane MacGowan, who died on November 30, and the great song “Fairytale of New York.” (Jeff is such a beautiful, sincere, eye-opening prose writer and I highly recommend all of his books, including his most recent, World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music.)

(In his post, Jeff also links to this lovely video of Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill performing “Fairytale of New York” at the funeral, which is worth a watch, if only, as Jeff points out, for the dancing in the aisles).

Hearing this song again made me remember the first time I ever heard it. I was, for reasons I don’t quite understand, late to The Pogues. But we were at a friend’s house for dinner and people were calling up songs for us all to sing along with, and “Fairytale of New York” came up, and I was loving it, and then we got to this famous exchange…

He: “I could’ve been someone.”

She: “Well, so could anyone.”

…and I burst into tears right there at the dining room table.

The song puts me in mind of an idea we were discussing last time, of “text reacting to text.”

You’ll perhaps recall the joy and uplift of this early section: (and if not, go back and listen to it!)

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing Galway Bay
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day…

What a tribute to new love. We pause there a moment, maybe recalling some first loves of our own; those moments of great hope, when, having met The One, we feel that, with love, all things are possible. (Such moments are real, they happen, they deserve to be praised in song.)

For me, as a listener, that’s plenty: a lilting, lovely tribute to new love.

But then it’s as if the song, being honest in that particular Irish way, knowing a little about life, takes a look at itself and asks, “What else?” Or: “Does such a state continue forever?” Or: “What more could happen? What sometimes does happen?”

This is what I mean by a text regarding itself. What’s really happening, I suppose, is that the writer is detecting a note of falseness, or, in this case, unsustainibility, in what he’s said so far. (It’s true, but is it complete?)

And then he responds to that. He starts, in other words, enacting a form of what I think of as “on the other hand” thinking.

The song leaps head in time (a year, I think), with no transition (you know: “And then it was the following Christmas,” or “months flew by/December again!” or some such.

And the woman in the relationship speaks:

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed…

The man responds with some insults of his own, and then the verse ends with this:

Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last.

And here comes the chorus again (same words, just about) which, this time, hits us as a heartbreaker:

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing Galway Bay
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day.

And then there’s the exchange that made me cry, and still does, just about every time, reminding me of folks I knew from my youth, whose lives didn’t quite satisfy and whose epic journey, in the end, was trying to make some accommodation to this disappointment; to see that, what seemed like disappointment was, maybe, just life:

I could have been someone (he sings)
Well so could anyone (she replies, and goes on):
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you

But the song’s not done yet. It decides to challenge itself again. The man now sings, perhaps at an even later time, of those dreams:

I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you.

And then we hear that chorus in a third, slightly different tonality:

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing Galway Bay
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day.

What a song.

There are different ideas about the chronology and, therefore, the meaning, but here’s how I hear it:

View One: They are in wild, happy love that will last forever and the world (and NYC) are paradise.

View Two: They were completely wrong. They are in hell. (And it’s all the other person’s fault, by the way.)

View Three: Well, they weren’t completely wrong and…they have what they have. Which can be seen as (maybe?) a new, more human-scaled heaven of sorts.

This interpretation is a bit complicated by the possibility that the whole thing might just be a memory in the mind of the guy at the beginning of the song, the guy in the “drunk tank,” looking back.

But we can see that revision might (if it helps us, and only if it helps us) be thought of as an attempt to get increased honesty into our work.

Now, by “honesty,” here, I don’t mean “what actually, usually, happens.” Rather, the idea, I think, is to keep getting the narrative to extend forward into new territory, by allowing additional possibilities in.

This could have been the song of that first, wildly happy, couple, who then stayed wildly happy. (Such couples exist, after all.) But the song wants to expand. It wants to lead us down the hallway of all that is possible in this world. (“What else could conceivably happen?")

This might be one reason that fiction sometimes seems to skew to the dark, the negative, the worst-case; a writer is trying to be honest, by accounting for all that can occur, and part of this process involves moving past what is statistically most likely, or is most comforting, and so on.

But we can sometimes get confused; we feel that a work that is dark and negative is, necessarily, being totally honest. But the great works, I’d say (or some of them, like this one), take this process all the way to the end, and can sometimes end in a burst of hope- because that is possible too.

Rest in peace, Shane, and thanks for all the beauty.

Sunday is Christmas Eve, our daughters are coming in, so how about we take the day off, and I’ll see you back here in a week?

Happy holidays everyone.

(Ack, just listened to it and am crying again.)