VMP Magazine

Christmas music lovers everywhere all agree on one thing: one of the best parts of the holiday season is the music. Many of these songs have been recorded a gazillion times, so you’d think it’d be hard to put an original stamp on something so ubiquitous. And it’s true. It is hard, which is what makes it so wonderful. You can’t just phone in Irving Berlin’s classic “White Christmas” or do a decent “Sleigh Ride” and expect must-have sales. Christmas albums and compilations are a dime a dozen, so there’s got to be something extra, some moment that makes a listener say, “Yeah, I want to listen to this every single year!”

Every contemporary holiday album owes a debt to one or more of the albums below. These are the big guns, the trail-blazers and the well-worn shoes, the ones we snatch out of the bins whenever we see that familiar album cover, where popular artists proved holiday songs didn’t always have to be solemn to be enjoyable. These 10 albums are the touchstones of Christmas music.

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.