I know, I know the holiday season has passed. But while it was happening, boy, did Mariah Carey get good news! In 1994, she recorded a Christmas album containing the song "All I Want For Christmas is You," a song that finally reached number one on the Billboard charts in 2019...25 years after it was released?? Yes, you read correctly. This song now holds the record for "longest climb to number one." And since the song was still at the top of the charts on New Year's Day of this year, Carey is also the first artist to have had a number one hit in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s.
But the OTHER exciting news about "All I Want for Christmas is You" is that was mashed up with a lot of stuff this holiday season! The ones that were shared with me include mashes with Radiohead, My Chemical Romance, Queen, Soulja Boy, Cardi B, Rammstein, and Taylor Swift. My favorite, though, is "All I Want For Christmas is the Beautiful People" by Bill McClintock (shared with me by Jason Mitchell). This track combines Mariah Carey with Marilyn Manson, to amusing and harmonious results.
This mashup (and all of them, actually) starts with the signature unaccompanied chimes from the beginning of Carey's original track. We're being primed to expect that classic Christmas song that it's hard to avoid at this time of year. But it is followed, not by the usual melismatic "I...," but with some interesting digital sounds that are slightly hard to place. Manson's drumbeat from "The Beautiful People" enters, and the content becomes clear. Instead of Carey's recitative-style introduction, we hear Marilyn Manson whisper-sing, "And I don't want ya, and I don't need ya," over the sustained orchestral chords. His voice is often doubled with a lower, growling voice, but neither contains much element of pitch, so transposition is not necessary for either source track. Manson's voice becomes much higher on the word "wrong" (in the phrase, "It's not your fault that you're always wrong."), and it doesn't strike me as funny in his original song, but it's pretty hilarious in the mashup - perhaps because it's the only time he ever truly "sings" a pitch. That word "wrong" can also be heard as completing an arpeggio that's set up by the orchestra and bells, except it's slightly too early.
Carey's accompaniment fits perfectly under Manson's vocals for the entirety of the track. Both increase in volume and intensity for the words, "Hey! You! What do you see?" Carey's own vocal track comes in for the chorus, as Manson's drops out. They sing at the same time, briefly, with her vocal line being punctuated with "Hey!"s from Manson, and as Carey holds out the word "you" (as in, "All I want for Christmas is you,") Manson sings his own chorus - "The beautiful people, the beautiful people!" In these cases where they sing together, they are not competing for vocal dominance; one is singing lead and the other is singing backup. The perfect fit of these incongruous songs is incredibly satisfying - all in all, a great mashup!
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