Shane MacGowan: The Drunk Poet Who Saved Christmas
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The post Shane MacGowan: The Drunk Poet Who Saved Christmas appeared first on Consequence.
On November 30th, 2023, Celtic punk legend and The Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan passed away at the age of 65. A gifted songwriter and lyricist, MacGowan left an unmistakable mark on music history, both as a member of The Pogues and beyond. More than that, he became an unlikely folk hero of Christmastime with the grimy but uplifting “Fairytale of New York.” I’ll always remember him as the man who saved Christmas for cheer-adverse misfits like me.
Listen, I’m no Grinch. I like Christmas fine — in fact, I’d even venture to say I quite enjoy the holiday season. But when it comes to Christmas music, my patience wears thin pretty quickly. Call it a symptom of growing up in a household that would play Music Choice’s Christmas channel 24/7 from November 1st to January 15th. Call it a symptom of working retail jobs where the manager couldn’t be bothered to add more than eight songs to the Christmas playlist. Call it a pretentious, punk attitude draped in red and green string lights. Luckily for me, every year, there came four and a half minutes of relief in the form of a song that seemed to sympathize with my generalized angst, a song that cut through the sleigh bells and ho-ho-hos to talk about something real: The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.”
For us kids like me, who liked their music loud and rough around the edges, MacGowan was our Mariah Carey. Year in and year out, his accented, slurred singing delivered us from the surprisingly small and repetitive Christmas music canon. Together with Kirsty MacColl and his band The Pogues, MacGowan had successfully Trojan horsed a crusty, combative drinking song into a landscape where the next edgiest song was about “a mean one.” Nick Cave called it “the greatest Christmas song ever written,” and we unabashedly agree.
From its opening piano chords and MacGowan’s proclamation of “It was Christmas Eve, babe/ In the drunk tank” (sung, mind you, as if MacGowan himself was still sobering up), “Fairytale of New York” was instantly recognizable. Once the rest of the band rushes in with their biting Celtic charm, the instrumentation ascends to a surprisingly jolly singalong while the lyrics descend into a lovers spat between an Irish couple on the wrong side of a Jameson bottle. It’s boozy, messy, and fun — not unlike a successful family Christmas in the Midwest.
Beyond its sheer catchiness and the novelty of its folk punk energy, the extra-musical context of the song only served to further enrapture us as aspiring counter-culture connoisseurs. Unlike other songs dominating mainstream holiday radio, the track has a seasoned history of censorship, particularly around the use of a homophobic slur.
“You scum, you maggot/ You cheap, lousy f****t,” MacColl sings at the song’s height of tension. Critics (understandably) have grown to take issue with the dropping of the worse of the two f-bombs, leading BBC to use an edited version that leaves out both the slur and MacGowan’s use of “slut.” But as MacGowan told it, the diction of the song wasn’t a misguided decision from a less sensitive time but a character-driven choice.
“She is not supposed to be a nice person, or even a wholesome person. She is a woman of a certain generation at a certain time in history and she is down on her luck and desperate,” he explained in 2018. The exchange between the song’s two protagonists gets pretty ugly, and the f-slur comes as it boils over.
Even still, the songwriter conceded that “if people don’t understand… then I am absolutely fine with them bleeping the word,” closing out the controversy once and for all, we’re sure [insert massive eye roll here].
Perhaps most remarkable, though, is that despite the less-than-loving scene depicted in the lyrics and the unsavory (we’ll call it) language, “Fairytale of New York” didn’t just subvert the Christmas canon, it became a part of it. Us outcasts could claim the song as “ours” as much as we wanted, but the fact remains that it has become an annual mainstay, accompanying the season as surely as gingerbread men and Santa commercials. Otherwise, the track’s controversy would be non-existent; nobody would care. You don’t see anyone up-in-arms over Pansy Division’s “Homo Christmas.”
Which is what makes “Fairytale of New York” not just a great song, but a great Christmas song. More than any traditional hymn or failed modern cover of “White Christmas,” the tune brings people together — ironic given its lyrics. It was the one song occupying the middle of the Venn diagram charting my mother and I’s taste, the one song we could both sing together on Christmas Eve without irony, contempt, or cynicism.
For that, me and my fellow Christmas-hesitants owe MacGowan quite a bit. With his passing, his impact only grows more profound. Here was someone who could balance accessibility and tuneful appeal with the messiness of life. Perhaps that’s the real reason “Fairytale of New York” resonates, not despite its darkness but because of it. Even those who get warm fuzzies from Christmas acknowledge the stress and pain the time of year can bring, and MacGowan managed to embody both the best and the worst of the holiday. It’s a skill he brought to all of his work, turning nuance into fun, true-to-life anthems. Though he won’t be around to see it, the misfits will undoubtedly champion his art for decades to come — especially when they’re sick of “All I Want for Christmas (Is My Two Front Teeth).”
This Christmas, I’ll be raising a pint in his honor, belting out “the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day” loud enough to land me in the drunk tank. I like to think it’s what Shane would have wanted.
Shane MacGowan: The Drunk Poet Who Saved Christmas
Jonah Krueger
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