Which Beatles Solo Christmas Song Is Worse?

E very Christmas season returns a collection of classic Christmas songs to store speakers, car radios, and home-audio setups across the country. It also revives an eternally recurring conversation about which of these songs is the worst (see National Review‘s own recent contributions to this discussion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Unsurprisingly, two of the more omnipresent songs belong to men who belonged to the Beatles, one of the world’s most omnipresent bands: John Lennon‘s “Happy XMas (War Is Over)” and Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime.” With the lads from Liverpool having recently returned to current popular culture after the release of Peter Jackson’s documentary about the making of Let It Be, their last album, now is a good time to weigh the respective (de)merits of their respective holiday hymns.

Let’s start with Lennon. “Happy XMas (War Is Over),” released as a single in 1971 by the Plastic Ono Band (John’s post-Beatles group), is one of the most famous protest songs, and likely the most famous such song released with a Christmas theme. It is relatively simple musically, though aided by a large children’s choir that supplies a countermelody. And its message is the culmination of two years of anti–Vietnam War activism undertaken by John and Yoko, begun while the former was still a Beatle. “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” a Beatles song, describes one aspect of this campaign: the “bed-ins” in which the pair simply sat in bed for an extended period to bring attention to the cause of “peace.” Closer to the song’s release, the two also put up billboards around the world that read “WAR IS OVER! If You Want It — Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.”

John’s politics during this period were insufferable, and not just because they weren’t my own. He was bitter and strident, and his “activism,” such as it was, lacked subtlety and efficacy. He seemed, at times, to have forgotten his own advice from 1968: “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” This is not, in itself, reason to dismiss the song completely. There is an ancient tradition of Christmas guilt-tripping. See, for example, Charles Dickens’s famous A Christmas Carol, in which the Ghost of Christmas Present presents to Ebenezer Scrooge a vision of the poverty that Scrooge had so disdained in his life:

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds.

This classic spirit is evident throughout Lennon’s lament, from the opening, guilt-inducing verses (“So this is Christmas / and what have you done?”) and with the constant “war is over / if you want it” background chanting. Yet it descends quickly to overdose, a reality that one official music video for the song, replete with exploitative video from the carnage of war, makes abundantly clear. But even setting aside the childish view that war could simply end “if you want it,” and the geopolitical implications at the time of Western pacifism in the face of Communism, Lennon’s song quickly grows monotonous and grating. A prominent vocal placement for Yoko does not help. And the reference to “yellow and red ones” now likely makes this song offensive, or at least dated, to the modern Left, a sign of how hard it can be to keep up with the revolutionary.

“Happy XMas (War Is Over)” is, in short, Lennon’s early post-Beatles career in quintessence: undeniable talent marred by insufferable politics and an inseparability from Yoko Ono. Yet it can still be credited with embodying an element of the social conscience that is, in fact, a part of the Christmas message (though it should never be the only part), however much Lennon sullies it with embarrassing counterculture claptrap.

On the other end of the Christmas spectrum, jarring in contrast, you have McCartney. “Wonderful Christmastime,” released in 1979, wasn’t the culmination of much of anything, other than perhaps his decade or so of commercial success after leaving the Beatles, as a solo artist and with Wings. It arose out of the same sessions as McCartney II, the “sequel” to the solo album with which Paul began the decade; they have little in common musically, aside from the fact that the talented multi-instrumentalist after whom both are named made both albums completely by himself. That was more impressive on such engaging proto-synthpop tracks as “Frozen Jap” and the bewildering “Temporary Secretary.” But the same impressive musicianship is at least somewhat on display in “Wonderful Christmastime,” which still makes McCartney some $400,000 a year.

Post-Beatles, critics didn’t always take kindly to McCartney’s success, a fact he accepted archly. One example of that is his response to criticism that he only wrote silly love songs: a chart-topping, infectiously catchy smash by that name which also served as a rebuttal to his detractors: “Love doesn’t come in a minute / Sometimes it doesn’t come at all / I only know that when I’m in it / It isn’t silly / Love isn’t silly / Love isn’t silly at all . . .” “Wonderful Christmastime” sees McCartney similarly abandoning any concern for how more-sophisticated audiences might receive his work, instead embracing, on a purely simplistic level, the joy of the Christmas holiday: “The moon is right / The spirits up / We’re here tonight / And that’s enough.” Such simple joy is also in keeping with the season. Turn again to A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge has decided to embrace the season’s joy after his reform:

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!

This easygoing holiday joy is the essence of McCartney’s classic, which is replete with references to children’s choirs, Christmas parties, holiday drinks, cheerful spirits, good feelings, and, uh . . . the moon being . . . right (?). The music video for “Wonderful Christmastime” makes it clear that everyone involved is “simply having” one, so you should, too. You almost have to admire the superficiality of its refrain, which becomes practically a boast, and a challenge to those who might have expected something a bit subtler from the same man who wrote “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude.” By the end of the song, though, its repetition has worn you down, such that you either have succumbed to it or become repulsed by it. And though McCartney is undeniably impressive in having assembled the whole song by himself, and though occasionally you hear bits and pieces of the innovative musicality of McCartney II, it doesn’t take long for a listener to realize that McCartney finished pressing all the buttons on his synthesizer by about halfway through the song. The rest quickly becomes tiresome.

“Wonderful Christmastime” is, in short, McCartney’s post-Beatles career in quintessence: commercial, charming, easygoing, and accessible — to a fault. Yet it can still be credited with embodying an element of the sheer enjoyability of the Christmas season, however superficially and tritely that spirit is demonstrated.

So whose Christmas song is worse: John’s or Paul’s? The answer is that, actually, they’re both pretty bad, in their own ways — yet each also has its moments. Since I implicitly promised to make a decision, I will “award” John’s grating guilt-tripping the title of the worse Christmas song over Paul’s cloying treacle.

The deficiency of each song reveals an essential truth about the pair’s time together in the Beatles. One of the things that made the band great was that the constituent parts held each other in check and improved each other, forcing each other to get better and restraining each other’s worst impulses. Once they split apart, they were all free to indulge in the tendencies that had been restrained. Unfortunately, they were largely worse off for it, even if each member of the band managed to create some pretty good music after the breakup.

It is hard to think of much else when hearing John and Paul’s solo songs around Christmas. Still, they did give us the music of the Beatles. And that’s a gift that will always keep on giving, even outside of the Christmas season.