CHRISTMAS POP

The number of Christmas pop songs in Italy is ridiculously low compared to the numbers on the international scene, but for some years now – more and more frequently – we are witnessing a thriving targeted production, often packaged and sold with newspapers or weekly magazines, showing a still immature market that is beginning to signal an emulative trend: the Christmas recordings that have sold the most copies are foreign pop songs and pieces like Happy Xmas (War is Over), among the top five hundred of all time. The large number of songs produced since the 1960s has failed to create an Italian repertoire that can compete with the international one. It is no coincidence that the artists who have made Christmas albums draw exclusively from the latter, with the sole exception of Tu scendi dale scale, from Enrico Ruggeri to Claudio Baglioni, Antonella Ruggiero and Irene Grandi. The theme album is an ever growing trend starting from the Zero years. Of the pioneers, there are those (over a dozen) recorded by the Piccolo Coro dell’Antoniano starting in 1965 (“E’ Natale”). But the first to enter the pop rankings (No. 48) was a CGD collection in 1985 entitled “Natale con I tuoi” (…). However, the most significant contribution to the genre comes from the singer-songwriters (…) But again in this case, we can’t say that there is a consolidated repertoire, songs that are heard more frequently during the holidays and that are dusted off regularly in the original version or re-recorded for the occasion. Nor have these songs become part of a more mainstream choral repertoire or that of mainstream singers. Remnants of a romanticism when the composer’s authority was a guarantee of quality, people prefer to admire an original, a rare survival of a concept that in the age when everything can be technically reproduced, a work of art is at odds with everything else. And with the idea of a Christmas supermarket that every year offers the same goods in new packages.

Excerpted from: Paolo Prato, I canti di Natale: da Jingle Bells a Lady Gaga (Christmas carols: from Jingle Bells to Lady Gaga), Donzelli: Rome, 2013 pp. 99-101