Word: spectors
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...Various Artists, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector...
...Long before he was an eccentric recluse charged with murdering an actress, Spector was the wunderkind of pop-rock production techniques, infusing such girl-group hits as "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "Be My Baby" with his Wagnerian pomp and sonic drive. In this great set, arranger Jack Nitzsche smartly attaches vamps from RB (Sleigh Ride's "ringa-linga-linga-ding-dong-ding") and the Big Band era to the Christmas hits of the previous two decades (no spirituals here) and supplements the tambourine-and-drum pulse of the Spector sound with chimes, sleigh bells and a million maracas...
...Alley helped define the Christmas feeling with movies and music. "White Christmas," "A Christmas Song," "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" - who wrote these songs? The same people responsible for most of the great pop music of the early and mid-20th century: Jews. In 1964, when Phil Spector produced a great album of seasonal tunes sung by his house performers (the Crystals, the Ronettes, etc.), he didn't call it the Holiday Album. It was A Christmas Gift for You, and it ended with Spector himself dewily intoning a Christmas wish, backed by violins sawing away at "Silent Night...
...Spector and other showbiz Jews hadn't been converted to Christianity, like Saul on the road to Tarsus. Their year-end tributes simply recognized that Christmas had already made its transition from holy day to holiday. It had become fully secularized, into a time of genial sentiment and credit-card debt - none of which had any direct connection to the birth of somebody's Savior...
...decades thereafter, I was unconditionally with Spector and Irving Berlin, on the "Merry Christmas" side of the debate - until the last few years, when some evangelicals and their media handmaidens made a big hairy deal about the meaning of Christmas. Like the stern secularists, they got it wrong too, insisting that Christmas was primarily a religious feast. Earlier, I was being a tad facetious about Halloween, but the professional Christians are dead serious. They want "Merry Christmas" to mean "Join with me in honoring the one true Redeemer...