I Will Remove All My Content From Spotify if They Continue to Platform "Wonderful Christmastime" by Paul McCartney

My conscience compels me

AN OPEN LETTER TO SPOTIFY

To Whom It May Concern:

As an artist, my work is a conduit for truth. Such is the impetus behind creations such as my classic “appetizer or urban legend sex act” bit, or that sketch I wrote that shows an old man penis six times. Justice is my pen, truth is my paper, and righteousness is…I dunno, the desk, I suppose. Or a big, hardcover book to bear down on, like an atlas or something.

As a person of conscience, I can no longer be a party to the inhumanities perpetrated on your platform. And I speak of one atrocity in particular: Paul McCartney’s 1979 holiday-themed synthesizer wank-fest “Wonderful Christmastime”. I cannot sit idly by while this song continues to be inflicted on the world.

The song fucking sucks. I mean it really, really sucks. When I say that it “sucks balls” — and I do hereby declare in front of God and everyone that Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” sucks balls — I don’t mean that it sucks “some balls” or “many balls”: I mean that it sucks all the balls. How the man who wrote “Helter Skelter” and “Eleanor Rigby” could also produce a trite, saccharine little Christmas ditty that makes The Wiggles seem like Black Flag is something I’ll never understand, but the fact remains that the song is a horror along the lines of the eruption of Vesuvius or the 30 Years War.

The tune is an aggressive, parasitic earworm. Only 13 words are sung before the abomination of a chorus is birthed from Satan’s butthole and begins feasting on the brains of the innocent. Unassuming souls — children, even! — who are cursed enough to find themselves in the wrong bank or grocery store in December might suddenly be accosted by staccato major chords and the sappy, repetitive refrain of “Siiiiiimply…haaaaaaving…a-wonderful Christmas time!” I was once in a Home Depot when this crime against music came on, and people started grabbing power tools and spontaneously committing suicide. I tried to shake a one-piece toilet off a high shelf, hoping to be mercifully crushed by its weight, but it only struck a glancing blow and left me semi-conscious and bleeding on the ground. Dazed and immobile, I attempted to open my jugular with a paint stirrer, but lost consciousness at some point during the synthesizer solo.

I typically don’t get the song out of my head until mid-fucking-March. Saint Patrick’s Day ostensibly commemorates snakes being driven out of Ireland, but for me, it’s a celebration Sir Paul’s dinky little Christmas tune being temporarily banished from my brain. Green beer and Dropkick Murphys songs blasted at an ear-splitting volume are typically enough to evict the last remnants of Macca’s Wings-era shit pile from my short-term memory, at which point I enjoy roughly eight months of blessed freedom. Then, inevitably, as the leaves fall from the trees and the Northern Hemisphere is gripped by icy torpor, the song pops up in a goddamned Old Navy ad and I’m cast back into hell.

And here’s the real tragedy: I fucking love The Beatles! Perhaps no other band means more to me; throughout my life, my successes, failures, happy moments and sad ones have been accompanied by a soundtrack of Beatles songs. Many of those songs were written by Paul McCartney. The fact that the absolute nadir of Sir Paul’s creative output is shoved in my face every holiday season is unspeakably cruel. What other embarrassing floundering from beloved figures must I be forced to witness? Should I be presented with a live stream next time Tom Hanks has diarrhea? Should I be forced to watch as E.T. struggles with erectile dysfunction? I believe I should not. But I submit to you that witnessing the master songwriter who helped shape modern music fart his way through a song that would embarrass Barney the Dinosaur is psychologically no different from being made to watch Spielberg’s beloved Extra Terrestrial try to slap his little alien bits to life in the corner of the bedroom, muttering “come on, dammit” over the soft flapping of his unresponsive member as his partner lies on the bed scrolling through her phone.

Spotify’s complicity in this crime is inexcusable. A recent letter from Spotify founder David Elk states “it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor.” This simplistic position ignores the fact that “Wonderful Christmastime” really, really sucks. David, listen to the song: It fucking sucks. The sappy melody, the trite lyrics, the instrumentation that sounds like a $30 Casio keyboard mixed with one of those guns you use to play laser tag — it absolutely sucks a fat donkey dick. It is beyond debate. The song sucks. It sucks. It sucks.

Should Spotify continue to be a means through which “Wonderful Christmastime” is inflicted on the world, then I must demand that all of my content be removed from your platform immediately. This would include both my podcast and an old standup album of mine from, like, 2009, which is on Spotify and I don’t even know how it got there (maybe my old manager put it there?). Collectively, this content has amassed hundreds, if not dozens of listens. I don’t know whether you will choose to host my content or content from probably the most successful singer-songwriter of all time, but you have to choose. You can have Maurer or “Wonderful Christmastime”, but not both.

I hope you’ll do the right thing. I must shed myself of any association with this song the same way that Gandhi shed himself of British-spun cloth, except that I’m sure we can agree that what I’m doing is more noble and better. But my conscience compels me to take a stand, because I can no longer share digital space with “Wonderful Christmastime”, because — and I hope I have made this perfectly clear — the song fucking sucks. It truly, comprehensively sucks. Hard.

And that shit he did with Michael Jackson isn’t exactly the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, either.

Yours in truth,

Jeff