Christmas Music and One Jamaican Song

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 15:44:00 -0600

This morning, I found a data set with all of the data for Billboard's Hot 100 charts.

So I did what nerds do. Ko has started up with the Christmas songs already, so I looked at the most interesting chart history I can think of.

You can tell when they started taking streaming into the formula for which songs chart. This one has hit #1 5 years in a row. (That spike at 2020 is the beginning of 2020, so really Christmas season of 2019).

I tried to sing along the other day, but it turns out that I know the first line of the song, the line "All I want for Christmas is you," and nothing else at all. I can ahhhhhhhhh along with the backup singers. I hope they're still getting paid for all of this.

Frosty the Snowman is the same way. I don't know a single line of that other than "Frosty the Snowman."

I finally got him to play the U2 version of Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), but he gave it 10 seconds and went back to the 1960s version.

That got me thinking about Bono and his wife being on Jimmy Buffet's plane when the Jamaican government decided that it was the ganja plane and tried to shoot it down. That lead to Jimmy writing the song "Jamaica Mistaica," which is fine as Jimmy Buffet songs go, but an all time great song title.

According to the lyrics, they were flying in to get chicken.

Not explained -- how it came to be that Jimmy Buffet and Bono were hanging out, got a craving for chicken, and decided to fly to Jamaica to get some. Where did they come from? What were they going to do after eating chicken? I first heard this story listening to Bono's autobiography, and it too leaves me with so many questions.