OutKick Readers Would Rather Be Waterboarded Than Listen To A Certain Mariah Carey Christmas Classic

It's Christmas Eve, which means it's time for another edition of the column that puts the "humbug" in "Bah, humbug," The Gripe Report!

Now, in a recent non-Gripe Report but still an instant classic article, I gave my list of the worst Christmas songs of all time.

It's a topic that has always fascinated me. Everyone has songs that, for whatever reason, just hit them the wrong way.

Have a gripe? Send it in!: matthew.reigle@outkick.com

Even if the purpose of the tune is to bring good cheer, it just paints a scowl on the eggnog guzzling mug of yours.

I had plenty of my own, but since it's the holidays and I still have some very last-minute Christmas business to tend to, I'm tossing the keys to you, lovely readers.

Don't do anything stupid, and have her back by ten.

That's all I ask…

"Wonderful Christmastime" - Paul McCartney

Duncan is going to bat leadoff with a song that also made my worst of list but deserves a slightly deeper dive due to the soaring level of crapitude it achieves given who wrote it:

Wonderful Christmastime by Paul McCartney is the WORST Christmas song I've ever heard.  I'd rather listen to Grandma Got Run Over by A Reindeer 100 times in a row than listen to Sir Paul's dreadful song once.  It irritates me that it's currently in my head.  I need to play some Metallica real quick.

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As I said in my list, the struggles the Beatles had writing Christmas tunes show how hard it is.

We all know Sir Paul can write a tune, so I don’t know if he was just kind of mailing it in, thinking, "I can half ass this and then be swimming in royalties until the end of time."

Wrong.

That had to be the thinking because it’s not a great song by any stretch.

It’s not my least favorite Christmas song, though, and I think I may even enjoy it the way I enjoy Plan 9 From Outer Space. It's fun because we all know it stinks, and it's just so bad that it paradoxically becomes good… maybe.

I can hear this photograph… (Photo By: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

"All I Want For Christmas Is You" - Mariah Carey

I knew it was only a matter of time before this song came up, and that’s one reason I left it off my list.

Take it away, Jon!

Mariah Carey’s "All I Want for Christmas Is You" is by far the worst of all time.  No contest.  Forget waterboarding, stick me in a room with this song playing on a loop, and I’ll confess to shooting JFK even though it happened before I was born.

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This is one of those songs that I hear the first note, and I’m like, "Dammit, not this again!"

To Mariah’s credit, I think this is probably the newest Christmas "Classic" that is in the rotation of every Christmas music-playing radio station in the country (except maybe stuff by Trans-Siberian Orchestra, but I think that’s too METAL for some music directors' tastes).

It’s also far from traditional. It’s a straight-up pop song with jingle bells.

To that point, the production is slick as hell, and that leads us to another perspective on this song, which comes to us from Tom:

It isn't Mariah Carey.  "All I Want for Christmas Is You" will probably be the song people send in most, but it's actually a pretty good song - the first 1000 times you hear it.  Still, it's overplayed because it is good.  That's the fault of the idiot who played it AGAIN, because they can't think of anything else, not the singer or songwriter.

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I think I’m with Tom on this one. I don’t care if I never hear "All I Want For Christmas Is You" again, but I don’t know that I’d call it bad.

It’s an original song that’s well done and well performed, but I think we all hate it because we’ve heard it 37,000 times in our lives.

I think we all have songs like that. I don’t hate Joan Jett by any stretch, and I don’t think this is a "bad" song, but if I never hear "I Love Rock ‘N Roll" again as long as I live, I’d die happy.

"Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" - Bruce Springsteen

Let’s turn it over to Michael for a song I kind of forgot about:

Loved the article!  You hit on a few of my obnoxious Christmas songs. But allow me to add to the list. Bruce Springsteen "Santa Claus is Coming to Town".  

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This one intrigued me. 

I love the original (and the Rankin/Bass special), but I’m not big on this one either, and that got me thinking about big artists doing versions of classics.

I think it’s always a lose-lose, and this is a prime example.

This version of the song sounds too much like Bruce Springsteen’s traditional oeuvre to be a Christmas song, but too Christmas-y to be something fans of the Boss would throw on with any regularity.

It’s like why the XFL failed (the first time). The football wasn’t could enough to keep football fans engaged, and there wasn’t enough pro wrestling panache to keep those fans’ attention.

Ergo, we all lose.

You’ve got to toe the line between traditional and something new, which is so hard. Don’t just play the song like any other song in your repertoire with a couple of jingle bells over top. That’s not a winning formula.

Man, look at young Michael… still about two decades away from trying to buy the Elephant Man's bones…  (Photo by Gilles Petard/Redferns)

"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" - Jackson 5

Michael has one more for us, and I think many will have this one on their list too:

Any song by The Jackson Five, especially "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."

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We’ve really got to break down this song because there are things to dislike about it on multiple levels.

Oddly enough, this song, in general, I can tolerate, but I hate things about it, and things about this version in particular.

First of all, I hate how people still debate what this stupid song means. I mean, really. Are people still not getting the point of it?

Guys, she’s not cheating; the dumb kid doesn’t realize that (SPOILER ALERT) his dad is dressed up like Santa Claus.

I don’t think some kid catching his mom getting around town like a Citi bike screams "Christmas," do you?

This song also made me realize something, and that is that I just hate it when kids sing.

I don’t like this song, I don’t like "Christmas Shoes," I don’t like "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth," and I don’t like "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas."

The only song sung by a child that I do like is "Rocking Around The Christmas Tree," and that’s because for most of my life, I thought it was a song by a woman in her mid-thirties.

Some of you are probably just learning this fact. 

For real, look it up. Brenda Lee was 13 when she sang that.

I'm not sure what's worse: the song the phone is playing or that little hat thing on top of the phone. (Photo by Frank Molter/picture alliance via Getty Images)

"Last Christmas" - WHAM!

And let's wind things down with an 1980s "classic":

Matt, I can’t stand "Last Christmas " by WHAM! I always mute it when it comes on Music Choice. What’s really bad is that other singers have covered it; therefore, it’s become a standard, and we will hear it until the end of time.

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First of all, I don’t like bands with punctuation in their names.

That’s strike one, WHAM!...

This feels like a cash grab. Not as bad as the Boss taking a song that existed, playing it, and then dusting it with sleigh bells.

Wham! at least attempted to write a new song, and once again, this just proves that doing so is ridiculously hard to do.

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That's it for this edition of The Gripe Report!

Have a merry Christmas, and if you've got something to gripe about, send it in!: matthew.reigle@outkick.com