Produced by the Was Brothers, IIRC, and probably the bleakest Xmas song I can think of.
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The performers really make a difference on this song. I like the She and Him version a lot, but I think my favorite is the one with Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews, who is definitely not singing it like an ingenue…
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And thanks, TheGreatParis, for that link to Seth McFarlane. I love that he doesn’t do the most standard of standards, for the most parts, and that I could honestly mistake him for an old-timey crooner if he didn’t sound so much like Brian. 
Oh my God I hate that song. To make it worse imho, it’s based on some stupid email forward. You know, if it had been a humblebrag by the singer and/or songwriter, but it wasn’t. It was based on an email forward.
I hate it with a passion. It’s worse imho because it was written by a Christian act. You know, the faith where if you perform an act of charity like this, you should do it in quiet humility. Or, you know, sing your guts out about it and make a TV movie about the thing you didn’t actually do, you just read about on the Internet but decided to write a first-person song about.
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So it is all the glurge…
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That song should come to mind as Back Door Santa provides the break beat for it. I hadn’t heard Back Door Santa before but was like hey that’s the break for Christmas in Hollis right away.
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Baby, it’s cold outside…
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Count me among them, unless you’re redefining “vile Orientalism” as “automatically anything written by 19th century white guys with East Asian characters in it.” I would have thought you’d appreciate its disapproval of the male lead’s mendacious boorish behavior since one could fairly expect authors of the era to make excuses for it.
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I think the definitive recording is by the great Dinah Shore and the tragic Buddy Clark.
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On the music:
the frantic imitative texture of the prelude seems to allude, from the very beginning of the opera, to the presence of the West through the busy machinery of counterpoint. In the context of such a musically strong characterization of the West, Cho-Cho-San’s music (whether or not based on authentic Japanese music) seems to project the image of an infantilized world, epitomized in the delicate and fragile musical idiom of the infantilized heroine of Puccini’s opera, Cho-Cho-San, the girl-bride, “bimba dagli occhi pieni di malia” (“a child with eyes full of seduction”).
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/orient.html
On other racist features of this opera and how it’s usually performed, I encourage you to read this brief reaction by a self-identified Japanese woman, which encapsulates reactions by many others of Asian descent:
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You used to be able to buy it in the UK and Amazon UK sells supposedly new VHS copies. There was a copy in my parents house when I was growing up
Yes, it is pretty racist. I have no desire to see it again.
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No Cliff?
Even that is close to 30 years old.
This is my favourite Christmassy song
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The Meiji Period in which the opera takes place was the beginning of Japan’s industrialization and internationalization. Thousands of Westerners were actively imported to help bring the country to modernity. The echoes of its purposeful insularity hadn’t yet faded.
In that context, Butterfly’s naïveté reflects historical reality more than any patronizing racist view of Asians as inherent simpletons. A young woman with no experience with outsiders, a woman who perhaps assumes a code of behavior that isn’t actually universal… She might be conned by a rakish foreign cad no matter where she lives. That story could have been set in Kansas.
Of course none of that excuses some of the blunders committed by the specific production criticized in your second link. The Met obviously has the resources to cast Japanese singers for Japanese parts instead of putting white people in yellowface. (I do think the critic veers into offensensitivity, but that’s to be expected from undergrads these days. I mean of course the kimonos aren’t the authentic reproductions she seems to expect — they’re opera costumes, meant to be seen from the back row. Nobody ever wore Kabuki outfits in regular life either, but that doesn’t make Kabuki’s cartoonish visuals culturally insensitive.)
I think a lot depends on the body language – you can say the same thing as a way to encourage further persuasion or to put your foot down. On the other hand, the subtleties of body language can be lost on men who won’t take no for an answer. I always wonder what the story was afterwards, presuming the idea is to work around a culture where the woman had to defend her honour.
Um… “it’s all cool, I’ll just tell my family you raped me”? What was the reaction supposed to be? Even as a roleplay, it says a lot about the boundaries of consent and the assumption that “she just melted into it” would be accepted as valid. It reminds me of some divorces that we saw in China – the families would agree on a story that each of them would give so that no questions will be asked: “his family will say that she was a bad mother, and her family will say that he beat her.”
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Or this one:
Had a feeling you’d double down, and it’s sad to see you going so far as, ironically, dismissing the critique of a person of Asian descent via infantalization.
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If you want to argue that 20 year olds’ brain development and educational experience aren’t underdeveloped compared to their elders, you’re going to have to find someone who’s more in the habit of belaboring the obvious.
I certainly don’t want to be lumped with the reactionary “herp derp look how edgy and un-PC I am” asshole crowd but it’s hard to deny that there have been a few decades of a trend of looking for something to be offended by specifically in order to use that status to insulate oneself from criticism. Her identification as Asian doesn’t give her apparent suggestion that an opera should cast a real live baby instead of a puppet any more weight. It’s just as dumb as if you or I said it. It’s not that I disregard her feelings out of hand, but she did a lousy job supporting them.
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Awesome! Was gonna post slick nick! I still remember the first time I found that import cd!
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Liked for The Farm. Not liked for Cliff.
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The syncopation in that one bothers me.
I get it when singers sing off of the beat in order to make the song sound more conversational, but, especially in a duet, every deviation from synchronicity is blatantly obvious, and it seemed random, not purposeful at all. It seemed like, “Oh, let’s try to make this sound more interesting by playing with the timing,” and it just didn’t work for me.
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