[347/365] Whamifesto

[cosmolinguist]

By December first this year, when friends started posting about #Whamageddon, I was already feeling personally offended. I had shown them how to live a life beyond Whamageddon! In posts made just before midnight on Facebook which won't show them to all my friends anyway! How dare they not have seen them, agreed with them, and changed their ways by the next afternoon?!

Heh.

How did this happen to me? How did I go from not knowing about Whamageddon to not caring about it for a couple of years to being vehemently opposed by this year?

Well, some time in December 2020, I think it was strange_complex who I saw saying online that she didn't like Whamageddon. I think I remember that it made her sad, because "Last Christmas" is a nice song and she didn't like missing out on it.

This was the first time I started to wonder about this game.

Whamageddon, for those who don't know what it is, is a "game" that consists solely of people complaining on social media (or elsewhere I guess!) when a nice thing happens to them.

Okay I'm not being fair. Like I said, I've been radicalized these last couple years.

Whamageddon is an attempt not to hear Wham!'s song "Last Christmas" from the beginning of December until the end of Christmas Eve. Once you hear it (on the radio or n a store or because your friend has maliciously tricked you), you lose the game, you are sent to "Whamhalla."

Before 2020, I accepted this for a few years as a dumb Twitter thing, like so many others. I didn't really know the song that well -- ironically, Whamageddon has had a proper Streisand Effect on me for this song! -- and didn't have any thoughts or feelings about it one way or another. I never would've said that I was playing Whamageddon, I consumed it passively like so many other things the internet seemed to inflict on me.

My feeling is that I first thought "hey, wait, is this keeping people from enjoying a likeable song?" pretty close to Christmas in 2020, so I didn't spare it a lot more thought then. It was my first Christmas away from my family, and I ended up leaving my spouse a few days after, so I can forgive myself for having other shit on my mind at the time.

But in the year before Christmas 2021, I'd found and become obsesed with the podcast You're Wrong About. I listened to almost all its back catalogue, including an episode called You're Wrong About Disco Demolition Night. And even though I listened to it at some random point in the summer I think, it popped into my mind when I started hearing about Whamageddon again that December.

Because disco -- as I've had to have it explained to me, being just a little too young for its heyday and only remembering "disco sucks" -- was extremely Black music and extremely gay music. And I thought about how gay "Last Christmas" is. And I thought about another version of this game I'd heard about, where the song to avoid is "All I Want for Christmas is You" by Mariah Carey.

And I know the point of the game is just that songs get overplayed this time of year, and I sympathize with people who work retail or otherwise are subjected to repetitive seasonal music they didn't choose and can't meaningfully refuse. But it doesn't seem like they're where the game came from. And I do find it noteworthy that, in a sea of Christmas music by white men from Bing Crosby to Michael Bublé, the songs picked out for avoidance and complaint are sung by a gay guy and a Black woman.

So I started reading about disco.

Dyer located [in disco] an expression of "the intensity of fleeting emotional contacts," which celebrate these emotional encounters while also including "a recognition of the (inevitably) temporary quality of the experience".18 He observed that these musical-emotional expressions need not be euphoric — in that many disco songs explore the negative side of emotional intensity (such as abandonment or betrayal by a romantic partner) — but he nonetheless described most disco songs of this type as "both a celebration of a relationship and the almost willing recognition of its passing and the exquisite pain of its passing".

Tell me that isn't a spot-on description of "Last Christmas"!

• intensity
• fleeting emotional connections
• celebrating these encounters
• acknowledging them as temporary
• abandonment and betrayal of a romantic partner
• recognizing the end of a relationshp
• exqusite pain of its end

Literally checks all the boxes.

Another quote says that disco's

passion and intensity embody or create an experience that negates the dreariness of the mundane and everyday. It gives us a glimpse of what it means to live at the height of our emotional and experiential capacities — not dragged down by the banality of organized routine life. Given that everyday banality, work, domesticity, ordinary sexism and racism, are rooted in the structures of class and gender of this society, the flight from that banality can be seen as — is — a flight from capitalism and patriarchy themselves as lived experiences.

I know that Christmas is the epitome of capitalism and indeed of patriarchy (there seems to be more acknolwedgement lately that women do all the work! what we call "holiday magic" is just women doing so many goddam chores and errands). But Christmas does also have the potential to "negate the dreariness of the mundane and everyday," to invite people to "live at the height of our emotional and experiential capacities" as an escape from routine, banality and the oppression that the everyday includes for a lot of people (gay people, say, or Black women...).

I could never convince anyone that I have escaped oppression related to Christmas, but I do think the last few years of not being able to spending it with my family have led to a queer Christmas in the widest possible sense of the word: like that bell hooks quote about “‘Queer’ not as being about who you have sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

From the lord of misrule to mistletoe as an excuse to kiss, Christmas is a kind of liminal time, when the usual rules don't apply, and there isn't inherently but I think there can be something really queer about that.

"Last Christmas" is, interestingly, barely about Christmas at all. It's about a year of heartbreak and growth. Christmas bookends the story but the song is about what happens in between (this person gave away George Michael's heart the very next day! what happened there so fast?!). The intervening time seems to have been used for reframing: even if the person is still irresistable, they're now understood to be poor relationship material ("My God, I thought you were someone to rely on / Me? I guess I was a shoulder to cry on.")

Which, also, seems pretty queer to me. Not that cishet people can't lust after someone unsuitable for long-term relationships, but again there's something about being at odds with the world around you, having to invent and create the places that suit you. Staying friends with your exes -- or at least friends with their friends, going to the same holiday parties -- is stereotypically a queer thing to do.

I don't know how "Last Christmas" was chosen over any other song to be the target of this game of survival. However queer it might be, I don't know if that was consciously a part of it. There's a meme I've seen around social media a lot that goes something like "You say you'd never mock an autistic person, but when you mock someone for being [weird, bad at particular things, etc., I can't remember the details] you're actually mocking them for traits that are inherent manifestations of their autism." And in the same way, people might just think they don't like this particular song, but I have to wonder if that isn't because of features of its produciton and performance that we've been taught to deride by our culture.

George Michael's singing is really gay. (All the cover versions that I've heard of this are vastly inferior! Even those from people I like; I heard Taylor Swift sing it on the radio today and I like Taylor Swift despite myself but I still disliked that!) Mariah Carey's singing is really Black-woman.

Maybe this is a coincidence. Maybe I am reading way too much into it.

But I think we should at least check. I don't think it's bad to look into this.

Anyway, if you want revenge games to play, I have found two over the last couple of years: #ReverseWhammageddon where it's actually good to hear "Last Christmas," and #Bublévion because if you want a Christmas-song-avoidance game, Michael Bublé provides both a much easier and much more rewarding (it really does feel like an accomplishment to turn off the radio when one of his songs appears!) version. I got the rules of both from social media, and I will include them here.

#ReverseWhammageddon
1 . The player must try and hear Wham!'s Christmas song, 'Last Christmas' as many times as possible.
2. The game starts at 00:00 on the 1st of December and ends at 23:59 on the 24th of December
3. Onty the original version of 'Last Christmas' will give you points. The player can listen to remixes and covers of the song all they wish but they score no points.
4. The player gets 10 points as soon as they recognise the original version ol the song. This is cumulative and by the end of the game (23:59 on 24 December) a total can be declared.
5. The player may if they wish post '#ReverseWhamageddon' on social media each time they win some points, and their final score at the end of the game.
6. Players can send it to other players if they want, and prank them with Wham to inadvertently give them Wham points.
7. Players dan't get points for playing it at themselves The point of the game is for it to find you and give you some happy!
Enjoy!

#Bublévion
Are you tired of missing out on undisputed Christmas banger Last Christmas by WHAM'S proud queer icon George Michael? Still want to play a pointless musical Christmas game that removes zero bangers from your playlist? Enter... BUBLÉVION!
The 1st Rule
The objective is to go as long as possible without hearing ANY song by Christmas song monopoliser Michael Bublé.
The 2nd Rule
The game starts on December 1st and ends at midnight on December 24th.
The 3rd Rule
This is normally the part where we'd say that cover songs don't count, but name us one original song by Michael Bublé. Go on, we'll wait.
The 4th Rule
You're out as soon as you recognise the song.
Bonus Rule
Post on social media with the #bublévion hashtag when you get hit.
PVP?
While we can't stop you from deliberately Bubliterating your friends, the intention is this is a survival game, not a Battle Royale. And honestly, would victory really be worth enduring more Bublé?

Thanks for reading.

Comments

I approve of your Whamifesto.

[kshandra]

I am largely agnostic (heh) when it comes to Whamaggedon or the Mariahpocalypse; I'm not bothered if I hear them, but neither do I seek them out. The original last-one-standing holiday song game is, of course, LDB (which I hadn't realized was already 25 years old!). That is the game that I emphatically refuse to play, because unlike its successors, any version of LDB counts as "losing" the game, and I will NOT deny myself the pleasure of Bing & Bowie.

...which brings us back to queer coding, doesn't it?

Re: I approve of your Whamifesto.

[cosmolinguist]

I didn't know about the LBD game until I tried to look up the origin of Whamageddon. And when I did, I immediately had this same thought: fuck anyone who tries to get between me and LBD/Peace on Earth!