Friends of Dave #364: 🎸mariah carey vs the world 🎄
What do Mariah Carey and AC/DC have in common?
Good morning, you stunning stack of FoD sunshine…..time to rise and read the preamble….
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Friends, before you continue, you should be warned that Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” plays a prominent role in this week’s issue. If this modern holiday classic is one of your favorites, I predict that you and everyone within earshot of you will very likely will hate it by the time you finish. On a positive note, if you are among the many that despise this song, I believe I am about to breathe some much needed new life into it for you. You might even make new friends because of it.
Either way, I take no responsibility if you end up doing The Carlton dance and hurt yourself…READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK….
This week, as I sat down to piece my thoughts together for the intro, I had a number of topics running through my mind. Honestly, I really had a couple of good ones I knew you were going to like and that would allow us to end the year strong.
Just as I was getting my laptop fired up and my fingers limber to work their magic, out of nowhere, I heard a distinct ping from my phone…..it was a text from our oldest kid (who, just to set the record straight, is a grown adult living on her own out of our house).
Now, as some of you may have wisely done as well, I have assigned each of my family members their own text ringtone on my phone (my wife’s may or may not be a rottweiler barking) — and let’s be clear it’s not so I can quickly respond to their every need or request.
Like putting a bell on a cat, they each have a distinct ringtone so that, depending on who it is, the time of day, what might be going on in their lives and the current balance in their bank accounts I can quickly determine if I need to look at the text or possibly ignore it and reply later with:
“I was busy on another call ”
“I accidentally left my phone in the car”
(taking a page out of their own playbooks) “sorry my phone died 🤷♂️.”
Sometimes, if I am really ornery I will just continuously reply “new phone, who dis?” (which really is code for “text your Mom”) until they stop texting me. As a wise man once said, “60% of the time, it works every time.”
Anyway….I love my kids, I really do…..and this time, I was up for the challenge excited to hear from my daughter.
Like me, she’s a big music fan (one of these days I will share the story about the time when she was 14 and talked her way into an impromptu Foo Fighters concert at a small venue in NYC), and knows how much I have a deep appreciation for well conceived mashups.
Her text was simply: “Here you go, Dad. All I Want For Christmas is Creed” and shared a link to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” remixed with 90s alt-pop-rock band Creed’s “My Sacrifice.”
Holy sh*t…I hate to say it….but it totally worked, right?
I mean, Mariah Carey and Creed mashed up is sort of like if Matthew McConaughey pitched putting pickle juice and tequila together to make a “Pickle Margarita” (alright alright alright). Who knew?
My heart bursting with pride, I was so happy that I didn’t passive aggressively ignore my daughter’s text this time. Choosing to read this one really was worth the risk I took.
So I looked for the perfect way to respond — and found a GIF of Alfonso Ribeiro doing his famous Carlton dance in an ugly Christmas sweater (see below).
I then made the “mistake” of playing the mashup again — WITH THE CARLTON GIF ON MY SCREEN. It was in perfect sync! Oh…my….god….everything in the universe all made sense….
Mariah, Creed and Carlton together was the best Christmas Post-Grunge Pickle Margarita you could ever order….and because they both could be played on infinite repeat, it was like I was invited to a 24/7 open bar.
Click on the Mariah/Creed mashup again and then watch Carlton do his thing while listening. Tell me I am wrong.
So, of course, like any normal human being, I HAD to see if there were other decent mashups with “All I Want for Christmas is You.” I mean, this is why Al Gore invented the internet right?
I will save you the time Friends. The internet is undefeated and the answer is a very jolly HELL TO THE YES.
It turns out “All I Want for Christmas is You” is the “Back in Black” of Christmas mashup partners…seriously more than you can count…and how did we not know this?
Ready? Here’s a Queen (“Don’t Stop Me Now”) and Mariah collaboration….and be sure to watch it at least one time with the Carlton.
It doesn’t have to be a super upbeat song to work either.
Do you like emo? How about a little My Chemical Romance mixed with your Mariah? It’s like if Halloween and Christmas met in the middle on November 27th and said, hey, let’s collaborate on something that will cheer up the sad people a little and bring those pretentious happy people down a notch….a little poop in your egg nog…a little joy and pain, sunshine and rain, holiday style….
With that in mind I present to you “All I Want for Christmas is the Black Parade” — and don’t forget to watch Carlton dance to this one.
Let’s see…..for those that might be on the naughty list for steadfastly refusing to do what they are told, how about a little Rage Against the Machine in an expletive filled mashup with “Killing in the Name?”
I know, right? And don’t tell me you can’t do the Carlton to that one. Believe me, Friends, I did it and you can too.
And here’s one you might actually hear when you are out shopping this holiday season….you guessed it, you can now do the Carlton AND Soulja Boy to this one…
Look, you could say that all you want for Christmas are holiday mashups and I could deliver like the Amazon Prime drivers that will be bringing boxes to your house this next week. Metallica, Radiohead, Marilyn Manson (!), Cardi B, Lil Nas X……and that’s just the remixes with Mariah Carey. Don’t even GET ME started with the searches for mashups with Wham’s “Last Christmas”….
So, as a result of a single, serendipitous text from my daughter, I was sent down a bit of a rabbit hole with this preamble. Nothing really particularly thought provoking or insightful was shared this week. I guess one could say it was My Sacrifice….and, by association, yours. But hopefully it was worth it.
Next week, as most long time FoDs may recall, will be the annual “Twas the Night Before” edition of the preamble. Click »HERE« if you want to see what you may be able to expect from past renditions.
Last real week of the year upcoming before most of the world takes a break — make it a good one!
XOXO
Dave
And now a few things to make you smarter…
Christmas today is a big business, and one part of that is the multibillion-dollar business of selling Christmas trees. The U.S. Christmas tree industry is so large, it even has two dueling trade groups: one that supports natural trees and the other, artificial.
Wilhelm Füchtner’s iconic 1870s design began a legacy that continues in the same small workshop in Germany’s Ore Mountains.
A machine-learning algorithm was able to tell which estate 80 Bordeaux red wines came from with 100 per cent accuracy by assessing their chemical signatures
Though the F-word was first in print around 1500, etymologists aren’t sure of its origins. For the next 500 years, it was censored in print and polite society, yet remained widespread in common use. Today, the word has lost much of its stigma and is being used more to highlight the intensity of a thought.