Despite the decades, All I Want for Christmas Is You et Last Christmas continue to wipe out all competition. Why is the Christmas hit, the subject of a plethora of offerings in the last century, no longer available?
We know the (Christmas) song; every year, as the holidays approach, familiar tunes resonate. After November 1, users of Spotify or Deezer throw themselves as one fan onto their streaming platform to listen to the same titles calibrated for winter, and make them climb again in the charts. charts. With a loyalty that borders on obsession… and prevents the classics from being renewed.
It's still difficult today to imagine Christmas celebrations without Last Christmas from Wham!, the duo in which George Michael began his career, or the stainless All I Want For Christmas is You by Mariah Carey. Two pieces 40 and 30 years old, respectively, but whose superb quality has escaped the wear and tear of time; on the contrary, each decade has only cemented their supremacy.
The fireside titans
You just have to look at the figures they record, almost always higher from one year to the next. Two weeks ago, the hit Wham! ranked third in American sales, a first in forty years of existence. As for Mariah Carey's, it systematically takes first place in the charts around New Year's Eve. With nearly 24 million plays on Spotify on December 24, 2023, it even became the most listened to song in one day in the history of the platform.
Alexandre Pipieri, pop columnist for the Deezer platform, observes the first bursts of listening to Christmas titles at the end of summer. “This year, our flagship playlist Christmas Hits doubled its streams during the first weekend of September”, he explains to BFMTV.com. And like every year, Mariah Carey and Wham! occupy the first two places.
“They have become symbols associated with the magic of Christmas,” he analyzes.
However, there is no shortage of competition on the English-speaking scene. Each winter brings its share of singles, even albums, made for the holidays. Modern crooners like John Legend but also pop superstars Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber have all tried it, sometimes with success.
Michael Bublé has even managed to become a holiday staple since 2011, but with a revival: It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmasa 1951 standard. The only song that managed to dethrone All I Want for Christmas Is You, in 2023, was a 1958 Christmas classic, Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree. In short, no original song has managed, in recent years, to last with the same force as those of Wham! and Mariah Carey.
“We could wonder about what allowed these two songs, in particular, to establish themselves and become new standards”, says for BFMTV.com Steven Jezo-Vannier, author of the book Jingle Bells – l The improbable history of Christmas songs (Editions Le mot et le reste).
“Mariah Carey, for example, has made a real business out of it,” he notes. In recent years, the 55-year-old diva has effectively managed to transform herself into the essential queen of Christmas. Each time, the same strategy: from November 1, the singer floods social networks with videos in which she appears in a red and white jumpsuit, surrounded by gifts, to officially announce that the time for festivities has arrived. Inevitably accompanying these pastilles with his favorite title.
The repercussions are always immediate: “On Deezer, listening to All I Want for Christmas Is You increase by 130% between October 31 and November 1″, notes Alexandre Pipieri.
Then begins, for the diva, an annual promotional marathon. Christmas-themed tours almost every year since 2014, a new music video for the song in 2019, a special Christmas show on Apple TV+ in 2021… Enough to make the competition very tough, especially since the recipe works wonderfully: according to estimates from The Economist, this piece alone brings him 2.5 million dollars each year.
A tradition made in the USA
A success which places its title in the pantheon of great Christmas pop classics, an American tradition in its own right which dates back to the interwar period. It is precisely in 1934 that it finds its source, according to Steven Jezo-Vannier:
“Two American songwriters, John Coots and Haven Gillespie, had the idea of making a Christmas song. At first, the record companies didn't want it: 'We're not going to release a song that's going to sell 15 days'… without realizing that we are talking about 15 days… every year.”
This song is Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (“Santa Claus is coming to town”). It then became the first contemporary Christmas classic and will be covered countless times by illustrious artists, from Fred Astaire to Kylie Minogue via Bruce Springsteen.
A new “explosion” occurs with White Christmasby Bing Crosby, in 1942: “The meeting with the public is also due to the melancholy of the piece, which comes just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The success is resounding”, reports the specialist.
A tradition is launched, and the decades that follow offer timeless classics: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Jingle Bell Rock, Baby, It’s Cold Outside…
All have become standards, constantly brought up to date by covers, and all re-enter the rankings each year. Above all, they laid the foundations of what a Christmas song should be:
“The time was for crooners and jazz, with Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. They were the ones who set the standards of the genre.”
A prolific genre over all these years, but which seems to have stopped renewing itself at the end of the 1990s, both Mariah Carey and Wham! managed to wipe out all competition.
Like a good (hot) wine
For Khal Ali, a YouTuber specializing in pop music with 100,000 subscribers, their dominance comes partly from the fact that Christmas, in his DNA, is a holiday steeped in nostalgia:
“I think, in fact, that Christmas songs increase in value over the years,” he explains to BFMTV.com.
This is evidenced by the very slow rise of All I Want for Christmas is Youwhich only reached number one on the US chart in winter 2019; 25 years after its release. Same long-distance race for Last Christmaswho topped the UK rankings in 2021 for the first time. “Christmas is a celebration which is based on the memory of moments spent together, of meetings. I can't imagine a song released three years ago becoming the iconic song of the end of year celebrations.”
Especially since, as the specialist notes, the songs of Wham! and Mariah Carey appeared “in a happier economic period”, far from current concerns around purchasing power, global warming or political instability: “We had more money to spend but also more hope , less anxiety, we had more children at parties, we waited for them.”
New consumption patterns, less conducive to novelty
Perhaps, then, these two titles owe their sovereignty to the fact that they carry within them the nostalgia for more serene Christmases. A comfort in which it has never been easier to take refuge, at a time when streaming platforms are encroaching on the radio monopoly… and attenuating their influence:
“The great Christmas standards of the 1940s and 1950s worked a lot thanks to the radio,” recalls Steven Jezo-Vannier.
“The way we consume music is changing: with streaming platforms, it is more chosen than received. We ourselves select what we listen to, and we return to things we know instead of orienting ourselves towards what's new.”
New classics?
Does this mean that Mariah Carey and Wham! will resonate forever once November 1st arrives? Not necessarily. “Today's adults are the ones who grew up spending the holidays with these songs,” notes Khal Ali. Since the pop scene continues to shine every year with new songs that smell like hot chocolate, and each generation is built around new standards, this reasoning implies that the irreplaceable nature of Last Christmas et All I Want For Christmas Is You may not be forever.
And the pop specialist already sees a future classic in the making: Santa Tell Me (“Tell me, Santa Claus”), a song by Ariana Grande released in 2014 which re-enters the rankings each year when the winter wind whistles and blows again. Amusing irony: in her early days, the singer's powerful voice and her R'n'B rhythms earned her comparisons to Mariah Carey.
“Santa Tell Me gains momentum; I hear it more and more in shopping centers, it is omnipresent on Christmas playlists,' says Khal Ali. Whereas when it came out in 2014, I don't remember it making that much noise. »
This week's Billboard rankings bear witness to this: with its 14th place, behind Mariah Carey, Wham! and older classics, Ariana Grande's song is the first on the Top 100 to be released after All I Want For Christmas Is You. This year, it became the third most streamed Christmas song of all time, behind Last Christmas et All I Want For Christmas is You.
According to Deezer, Australian star Sia is also doing well with Snowmana 2017 title that has been climbing the charts ever since. Not enough, for the moment, to overshadow the current superstars of the parties: Mariah Carey returned to first place in the American ranking two weeks ago.
