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No, you are not experiencing a Soul Train flashback or The Alternative Lifestyles of Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston. Today's Christmas gift (okay, it's not Christmas yet, but I can shill what I want, it's my blog, nimrod) is "It's Xmas" by King Street/Nite Grooves recording artist Stephanie Cooke. Taken from the label's Christmas in the House collection, "It's Xmas" is just what Santa ordered to get you off the couch and into the shopping mall. Nothing is more conducive to shopping (and the over-commercialized Christmas season) than a monolithic house beat. We used to call it disco before Frankie Bones and the like stripped disco of its middle class heritage and injected it with some dark urban angst.

Anyway, Christmas in the House is more experimental and genre busting than you'd expect. Along with the opening salvo of time bombed, four-to-the-floor bass drum in Cooke's dulcet "It's Xmas" (she has a beautiful voice that will make you soon forget the dump-dump-dump beat) the CD goes all ethereal and chicken scratch funky (is that Luther in there?) with Diviniti and Pirahnahead's "The Reason," creates an eerie, found sound montage within Ananda Project's lustrously moody "Christmas Lights" and uncovers tribal orgiastic thumpery in Eric Kupper's decidedly pagan take on "Silent Night." The rest of Christmas in the House is stone cold house to the cranial lobes, my friend:  DJ Spen & The MuthaFunkaz's "Our First Christmas," DJ Oji & Joi Cardwell's "One Wish" and   Frankie Feliciano's "December" will all have you bumping and grinding for your own personal pagan Xmas party. So lift a snifter of Courvoisier, stuff some chocolate in your pants (how ya like me now?) and remember, Christ is the reason for the season.

Stephanie Cooke
"It's X'mas" (mp3)
from "Christmas In The House"
(King Street Sounds)

More On This Album

Matzoh Balls and Tiny Totele

Chanukah is over, a good Jewish friend tells me, but if you are ignorant of most things Jewish, as am I, there is no reason you can't still enjoy some old fashioned Chanukah music.  Stanley Adams and Sid Wayne's Chanukah Carols is like listening to Mel Brooks, Larry David and Sid Caesar collaborating on Yiddish versions of Christmas classics. Poems are subverted for Yiddish tastes, "Deck the Halls" is deranged into a hilarious Jewish party ("Deck the halls with loaves and latkes"), while "Let's Put The 'Ch' Back In Chanukah" suggests replacing gift giving with pool playing and wearing a yarmukle.

From the liner notes: "The lucky listener will once again be able to re-capture the beauty, warmth and laughter of the fast disappearing era, when chicken soup was king and potato kugel was the staff of life."

Oy vey!

"Matzoh Balls"