VMP Magazine

It’s happening sooner and sooner every year. An entire section of your local record store has been taken over by crates of backstock Christmas albums visibly dusty from the 11 months they spent stashed away in the basement. Dollar bins overflowing with Firestone Christmas albums, themselves stuffed wall to white-wall with festive schmaltz from Bing Crosby, Leonard Bernstein, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. If you’ve been keeping count, and why wouldn’t you have been, there are now seven(!) different variations of the Now That’s What I Call Christmas! collection to be had. Maybe you even get inspired to search around the floorboards of your car for that battered copy of The O.C. Mix 3: Have a Very Merry Chrismukkah.

Are you a puzzled relative of a vinyl-loving, music-obsessed youth? Or are you a vinyl-loving, music-obsessed youth that is really trying to avoid another well-intended Coldplay T-shirt, even though you've told Uncle Pat that you haven’t liked Coldplay since your 6th grade boyfriend broke up with you at Hot Topic in 2004 while “The Scientist” played on the radio? Or, perhaps, your Uncle Pat is more vinyl-loving or music-obsessed than you, but you seemed to have drawn his name again in the family Secret Santa. Either way, this article may be of some assistance.

If I’m being completely honest, I, a vinyl-loving, music-obsessed youth, am writing this because I’m fairly sure my mom searches the internet regularly for my bylines, and I’m hoping she finds this and buys me a few of these things. That being said, I realize this is likely a helpful tool to make your favorite vinyl-lover beam during the holiday season.

If hip-hop has a Constitution, buried somewhere within its depths, there is surely a clause stipulating that if you reach a certain echelon of success, you have to make a Christmas song. Part of why the “Christmas Rap Song” trope is so enduring is that it allows rappers to use holiday cheer as a weapon to deflate the overblown machismo and bluster that often serves as the backbone of the gangster rap persona while also indulging in it––what is a rapper like Jim Jones gate-crashing your Holiday party doing if not injecting danger into a holiday that in many ways defines our nation’s sanitized, capitalist impulses?

There were a few Christmas rap songs that I wanted to include on this list but, regrettably, have not been released on vinyl–– “Ghostface Xmas” and The Ying and the Yang of the Holidays, I’m looking at you two––but if you want to amuse your little cousin and horrify your parents through playing vinyl this holiday season, this here list is a good primer. It would be unfair to say these tracks have not aged well, because they were not meant to be good in the first place––Snoop Dogg was under no illusions that “Santa Claus Goes Straight to the Ghetto” was not up to snuff with his contributions to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic––but that doesn’t mean they aren’t all charming, original, and funny as hell.