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.
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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.