I Love a Bunch of Genres

Up on the Housetop
Crew X
Christmas Rap

My own history with Christmas Rap isn’t an action-packed tale of derring-do on the level of a sizzling summer blockbuster, but it’s a story I like nonetheless.

Back in the eighties, my mom taught special ed in downtown Detroit. One day she happened upon a tape titled Christmas Rap and bought it thinking that her kids might like it, which seems like a safe bet, as it was eighties-era Detroit. To wit, I’m just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit in the eighties, and I love Christmas Rap.

I’m sure I listened to Christmas Rap at some point in the era when cassette tapes were still relevant, but my vivid memories of the album don’t begin until many years later when I had a car with a tape deck, and I went scrounging through the boxes in the attic.

Sadly, the same fate which befalls all tapes took Christmas Rap away from me too soon. You know what I’m talking about. That moment when the sound folds around itself, and you reach for the eject button in desperation, only to find that when you pull the cassette out, it’s trailing a looping strand of magnetic tape behind it. There’s a singular kind of sadness that accompanies the death of a tape. If I may put on my crotchety old man hat, these kids today with their blinking MP3pods don’t know what it was like, and, in a way, they really are missing something special.

This story does have a happy ending, though. A few years ago, my friend Erin found a whole pack of Christmas tapes at a Dollar Store, featuring none other than Crew X’s defining work. If you’ve ever needed proof that the though counts when it comes to gifts, there you go. One tape in a three pack that cost a dollar total, and it stands out as one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.

Christmas Rap truly is the First Noel.

Do it!