OT Advent Calendar Day 12, Holiday Hip Hop Edition

Advent has always been my favorite time of year. Not only does it lead up to the festival of Christmas, but my birthday falls right around half way through. What’s more, I grew up in snowy Central New York—that’s the barren hinterlands of Upstate, for those in the city so nice they named it twice—and if I didn’t get a White Christmas, the Great Lakes were good for a storm around my birthday so there’d at least be a good beginning to the winter.

Advent is far from an untouched subject around these parts, so I’m clearly not alone.

Your OT Advent Calendar this year will be musical. We’ll talk about diamond-in-the-rough traditional tunes just waiting for renewed popularity, crimes against Christmas, the silly songs and the songs that have become modern traditions. We’ll also talk about the notion of true Christmas Carols, those which address the twelve days festival beginning on Christmas itself, including not just the one day-counting song but another. 

Let’s dive in, shall we?

Today’s tunes are “I Am the Grinch,” by Tyler, the Creator versus “Christmas in Hollis” by Run DMC.

Until the Wu-Tang Clan release a nine minute everybody-gets-a-verse track entitled “Santa’s Elves Ain’t Nothin’ to F— Wit’,” we will not have a definitive Best Hip Hop Christmas Song—my list of of Christmas Parody Wu Tang songs is unpublishable, trust me—that said, let’s see if I can’t settle on a number two.

We’ll start with the new, “I Am the Grinch” by Tyler, the Creator.

This song doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s well produced, yes, though the found-sounds-as-rhythm is at least as old as The Dark Side of the Moon, and was done with more complexity in the mid 90’s. The mumble rap flow—picture the “artist” with his elbows glued to his ribcage, hands at shoulder height and torso bopping and swaying drunkenly—is a passing fad, if not already dated.

The real problem with the song is that it cuts between hip hop, R & B, Christmas and soundtrack moments that it fails to cohere as a complete track.

What it does well is capture the mindset of the Grinch, but in this it fails as well, as it does not connect to the film it accompanied very well. The spirit of that film was significantly more coherent and focused.

Not a fan.

“Christmas in Hollis,” you are our only hope.

The video is remarkably self-aware in it’s camp silliness.

The poorly fitting Santa suit and the cardboard props are amazing.

The premise of the first half of the song is that the group was out on a snowy night and found Santa’s wallet but, unwilling to rob Santa, mailed it back to him only to discover that he’d intended the money for them.

Is there any more 80’s Hip Hop Christmas premise than that?

Yes, the flows would be bested by Rakim and others in the years between then and now, but the spirit of fun and Christmas is more than evident.

Until I hear somebody insist that Liquid Joy is the best Wu Tang record, this will suffice.