Whamageddon Be Damned!
Wham!’s “Last Christmas” is ubiquitous during the holiday season. Not Mariah Carey “All I Want for Christmas is You” ubiquitous, but close. The British pop duo’s 1984 Christmas classic has become such a part of contemporary holiday seasons that it has become a social media game, Whamageddon—a game of musical dodge ball with the idea being to avoid the song for as long as possible.
Recently, 12 Songs’ Alex Rawls wrote an essay of “Last Christmas” for an upcoming book. Here’s his take on the song, and the way the factors that contribute to its current omnipresence were part of the song from the start.
“Part of the reason for ‘Last Christmas’’s success is that it sounds like nothing and everything,” wrote Rachel Aroesti for The Guardian. Dick James Publishing agreed. It thought the Christmas classic from 1984 sounded so much like “Can’t Smile Without You”—made popular by Barry Manilow and The Carpenters—that it sued Wham!’s George Michael, who wrote the song. According to legend, the publishing company dropped the case when a musicologist listed more than 60 songs with similar chords and melodies, but Aroesti’s right. Michael certainly had a skill for writing songs that sound instantly familiar. He was a pop artist in the purest sense of the word, and his songs live in a musical fun house as reflections of hits that came before them. The roots of “Last Christmas” are in R&B, but with far more R than B. You can hear echoes of Motown in the song, but no one will mistake it for Motown.
That pleasant familiarity could be Wham! In a nutshell with songs largely untroubled by gravity. The slapstick good times of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” are the most obvious example, but even their most heartbroken songs seem heart-dented at worst—fender-benders of love rather than romantic four-car pile-ups. “Last Christmas” fits in their canon with a grade school sense of tit for tat at the heart of its chorus, but like their other hits, the song’s too immediate and efficient to doubt completely.
“Last Christmas” comes near the end of Wham!’s recording career, and it certainly closes out the duo at their prime. “Last Christmas” is of a piece with the songs written for 1984’s Make it Big, which were all in a different league from 1982’s “Wham Rap (Enjoy What You Do),” which took the bold stance in favor of being young, on the dole, and having fun. By contrast, “Last Christmas” is a penetrating psychological study, starting with the song’s well-known refrain:
Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the very next day you gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I'll give it to someone special
But later, Michael suggests that all this romantic tough talk may just be bluster.
Merry Christmas, I wrapped it up and sent it
With a note saying, "I love you, " I meant it
Now, I know what a fool I've been
But if you kissed me now
I know you'd fool me again
After “Careless Whisper” from Make it Big, Michael’s outrage at his shabby emotional treatment in “Last Christmas” is a little rich. He complains in “Careless Whisper” that he can’t dance because “guilty feet have got no rhythm.” Then again, relationships were all pretty bruising on Make it Big. Once you get past “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” you get “Everything She Wants,” in which Michael wonders why he works so hard to support a woman who only wants his money, and “Freedom,” in which his love encourages him to fool around too.
“‘Last Christmas’ isn’t just about the lies we tell ourselves in order to cope with rejection—it’s also about the cognitive dissonance of obsessive love,” writes Rachel Aroesti. “At the end of the first verse, Michael pithily sets out this kind of doublethink: now he knows ‘what a fool I’ve been, but if you kissed me now, I know you’d fool me again.’ It’s just one heart-rending epigram in a song full of them, capturing the way defiance masks hope, and how easily love and desire can delude us into forgiveness.”
I hear “Last Christmas” less charitably. I get soap opera from the song, and while that doesn’t negate Aroesti’s take, it does shelve it. I hear the ping-pong of the relationship as the song’s central feature, whereas Aroesti foregrounds Michael’s efforts to come to grips with the break-up. The song’s video, I’d argue, backs me up. In it, Michael, Wham! mate Andrew Ridgeley, Spandau Ballet’s Martin Kemp, and Wham! backing vocalists Pepsi and Shirlie bring dates to spend Christmas in a ski lodge in Switzerland. They trim a tree, have dinner, a snowball fight, and go back down the mountain the next day. While at the chalet, Michael shares wounded and wounding looks with the dark-haired woman played by British model Kathy Lee who was invited to the gathering by her video boyfriend Ridgeley.
We learn in flashbacks that Michael gave his heart to her last Christmas, symbolized by a jeweled brooch. She not only gave away his heart but the gift, which we see pinned to the lapel of Ridgeley’s jacket while they sit at the dinner table. Michael tries to make eye contact with Hill while everybody around him drinks wine and has fun, but she and Ridgeley are close at the other end of the table. When she briefly looks back at Michael, she runs her finger over the brooch. Michael, vexed, plays with his lower lip in sulky thought.
We’re supposed to see that Michael’s not over her and that she’s taunting him cruelly, but his acting chops can’t sell the mixed emotions, and the playground I’m-rubber-you’re-glue of the song’s chorus doesn’t help. He looks like a very handsome fifth grader who wants to pass her a note—“Do you really love me? Check yes or no”—or consult a cootie catcher to determine Hill’s true feelings. Ridgeley misses all of this throughout the video.
There’s a lot to love about the “Last Christmas” video, not the least of which is a shot of Michael with a fur collar that mirrors a famous one of the actress Tuesday Weld that Matthew Sweet used as the cover for his Girlfriend album in 1991. Your eye goes to Michael and Lee in the video in part because they’re the story, but also because they’re the two most beautiful people present and they’re presented that way. To be fair though, all of the guests in this Alpine Christmas party are good looking, and it’s also hard not to love those ’80s winter coats, one of which looks like the coziest robe ever made.
Michael wrote and recorded “Last Christmas” himself—a process that took longer than necessary since he was still learning to play some of the instruments. The song starts with a simple, bouncy, four-chord intro played on synth, and those same four chords in the same sequence with the same bounce define the chorus and, with slight variations, the verse. That economical arrangement means the song never drifts too far from its hook, but the insistent buoyancy means the heartbreak never really lands. Michael’s hit-making impulse defends the song against any real melancholy.
“Last Christmas”’ lyrics sound more credible when sung by an 18-year-old Taylor Swift in 2007. She opened The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection—the EP that followed her debut album—with the song, and you can hear her youth in her vocal performance. She sounds genuinely and convincingly wounded by the cad who gave away her heart, and she sings the chorus as if its logic is bulletproof. The acoustic guitars that framed her still-country sound at the time emphasized her sincerity, and she shied away from any touches might undercut the song’s gravity.
My favorite versions of “Last Christmas” comes from artists whose careers and output have flirted with the soap opera at the song’s core. Swift’s songs are scrutinized for clues as to which famous break-up inspired what song, and although that wasn’t necessarily the case when she cut the “Last Christmas,” it has become enough of a part of her career narrative that the association applies to her version.
Similarly, Ariana Grande’s love life has been similarly tracked in the media as she has dated musicians, backing dancers, and comedian Pete Davidson, who she addressed in 2019’s “thank u, next.” The media’s handling of her public life and to a lesser extent her music invites us to see her career through the lens of soap opera, and that framework made her 2013 version also seem apropos. For me, the best in this mode comes from Vancouver’s Carly Rae Jepsen, who released her version of “Last Christmas” in 2015. Jepsen’s take mimics Wham!’s with gentle synths floating behind Jepsen, who sings, “Once bitten, twice shy” like she’s been bitten 15 times. When she asks, “Tell me baby, do you recognize me? / It's been a year, you know it doesn't surprise me,” she sounds like the answer’s genuinely in doubt.
Jepsen’s love life is less storied than Swift’s or Grande’s, but her performance matches Michael’s for melodrama, and like her biggest hit, “Call Me Maybe,” “Last Christmas” asks listeners to become invested in the quotidian back and forth of her relationship. It’s one episode in a story that started before the first note in a song that hints that the story will continue long after the song ends. Soap operas also ask fans to invest not in the story itself but the protagonist and his or her ongoing struggles with romance. “Last Christmas” wants us to take the singer’s wounded side against the person who broke his or her heart and hope he or she will be strong enough to resist the heel’s lies again. If you want to know what happens next, tune in next Christmas.
The soap opera in the song is strong enough that “Last Christmas” inspired a 2019 movie by the same name that steered somewhere between a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie and It’s a Wonderful Life. In it, Emelia Clarke plays a selfish, self-destructive woman whose life is turned around not by angel as in the Jimmy Stewart Christmas classic but the spirit of the guy whose heart she got in a transplant. He’s her love interest in Last Christmas until we discover that he’s dead, so in the end she does and doesn’t get the guy and becomes a better person in the process.
The soap opera is so strong in the song that some have argued that “Last Christmas” isn’t really a Christmas song, and there are versions that take any illusion of seasonality out of the mix. In 2019, indie singer Lucy Dacus released a churning, straight-ahead punk version that’s joyous in its disregard for Christmas niceties and George Michael’s feelings. “I don’t really like Christmas,” Dacus said at the time. “In the studio, we listened to the original of ‘Last Christmas’ and didn’t talk about an arrangement. I just told everyone to play it angry. This is what happened first take. It actually came out pretty fun, maybe a tad psychotic.”
But really, the question is a fig leaf for those too cool to admit to liking Christmas music. Wham! released the song on December 3, and if Michael didn’t want a song titled “Last Christmas” that he released in December to be associated with the holiday, he stacked the deck against himself. And now as then, we hear the song each Christmas season. Radio stations play it and people stream during the holidays, not before. Or not in statistically meaningful numbers.
And like any good Christmas song, it has had a life longer than the season of its initial release. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” set the blueprint by being released in 1942, then returning to the charts the following Christmas, and the year after that and yearly until 1970. “Last Christmas” made it to number two on the British charts in 1984, where it was nosed out by Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” which features George Michael, Bono, Boy George, Simon LeBon and a who’s who of British pop royalty at the time. “Last Christmas” returned to the charts in 1985 and 1986, and it has charted yearly since 2007, returning to the top 10 each year starting in 2016. Michael died on Christmas Day 2016, so fans and those who find symmetry irresistible rooted for “Last Christmas” to top the British charts on Christmas 2017. The British Christmas number one is a national obsession, and one gambling houses will lay odds for. In October they bookies were giving 4/6 on “Last Christmas,” making the song a prohibitive favorite. The odds makers didn’t count on Ed Sheeran though, whose “Perfect” nosed the song out of the top spot that year.
“Last Christmas” wasn’t released as a single in the US in 1984, and it didn’t crack the Hot 100 until 2017 when changes to Billboard policy allowed previously released songs to enter the charts and streaming to count in the calculation of its chart position. Those changes made it possible for Mariah Carrey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” to reach number one on the Hot 100 in 2019, 25 years after its initial release, and it’s easy to envision “Last Christmas” eventually topping the charts as well. It has been trending up the charts in England and the US, and if the Last Christmas movie becomes a seasonal must-stream during the holiday season, that will absolutely help.
Billboard’s changes only partially explain its endurance, though. In 2017, musicologist Joe Bennett from Berklee College of Music studied Christmas songs and found that the most successful songs averaged 115 beats per minute, featured sleigh bells, and were written in a major key. “Last Christmas” lines up almost perfectly with bells, 106 bpm, and the key of C. Even the hint of melancholy is in the blueprinted sweet spot.
And for Christmas music, nostalgia always matters. Teenagers who were the right age to find “Last Christmas” emotionally clear-eyed in 1984 are now in their 40s, and loving the song today is a way to love the people they were then, when they felt on the cutting edge by being fans of Wham! and bands on the forefronts of music, style, and even world events. “Do They Know it’s Christmas,” after all, tried to take on hunger in Africa.
And, broadly, nostalgia is hardwired into Christmas. The familiarity of songs we’ve known for decades helps them sound good if not fresh, and since “Last Christmas” is built on musical ideas that were lived-in to start with, its endurance seems inevitable.