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Friday, December 19, 2014

I Don’t Want to Live in Your Marshmallow World

Hi. Do you know this song “Marshmallow World”? Because I didn’t up until a few weeks ago. Here, it sounds like this.



I am one of those annoying people who actively enjoys Christmas and its various trappings — the food, the pagan gobbledygook we hang all over our houses and even the dumb songs. Now, there are not often new Christmas carols. People try, but it’s hard to write a song that people will actually be singing a year from now, to say nothing of a full decade. We tell the song-writers, “No, who needs your dumb garbage song when we have, like, a hundred other Christmas carols that we already know the words to?”

This year, however, I have heard “Marshmallow World” repeatedly — in a commercial, in a viral video, at the grocery store and twice at the same mall. I had never noticed it before. I initially thought it was maybe one of those new garbage songs, but it’s apparently been around since Bing Crosby recorded the first version in 1950. It’s possible that everyone else knows about this song and I’m just oblivious, but even if there’s not a concentrated push for “Marshmallow World,” I want to go on the record saying it sucks.

I realize the importance of secular holiday songs, but songs about winter are dumb because everyone knows it’s the season in which you’re most likely to die wearing a scarf. Snow makes most things worse. Also, when it snows, it doesn’t look like marshmallows. If you’re comparing snow to food, then shaved coconut or frosting make more sense. Marshmallows are uniform in size, whereas snow does not come in standardized units. As it stands now, “Marshmallow World” sounds like the worst set of levels from Super Mario Bros. 3. Finally, the line “It’s a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts” is offensively dumb. People who talk about how bad songwriting has gotten today need to remember that as long as words have been put to music, people have been half-assing it and saying “Well, this fits. Let’s just keep these crap lyrics until we think of something better” and then never thinking of anything better.

Please, stop with your non-Parson Brown-starring odes to the glimmering magic of a winter landscape.

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