"Oi To The World" / No Doubt / A Very Special Christmas 3

It looks as though my itunes has caught the early Christmas impulse that the rest of the world has these days.

What is considered "the Christmas season" has been slowly inching up earlier and earlier each year, obliterating Thanksgiving completely and making Halloween nervously look in its rearview mirror.

Just today in the grocery store I saw the first of the Christmas themed magazines on the shelves, which pisses me off and makes me anxious. Yuck.

So here's my shuffle piling on and picking a Christmas song in the middle of October. But at least it's one of my favorites from possibly the best Christmas CD ever.

This song is actually a cover of another ska / punk band called The Vandals. It's a little odd to think that a word with ominous racial and skinhead overtones as "Oi!" would figure prominently in a Christmas song, but maybe it's "reclaiming" the word for good, or something.

Peace. Goodwill. Skinheads.


Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and cop to being a No Doubt fan, as I do like the ska. Between the wife and myself, I think we own all their albums (Gwen Stefani...that's another story). They obviolsly have a good time with this one, racing through it at a cozy two and a half minutes.

I love the bass intro (of course), setting the tone right off the bat. (Tony Kanal was, in my opinion, a pretty big part of what made this band great. Stefani got all the publicity, but he was the main songwriter and the biggest ska fan in that band). You got to have the horns to make it an official ska song and here they come right on the heels of that bassline. Also, check the little bass / horn breakdown there in the middle of the song - am I making this up, or do they play a little snippet of "Frosty the Snowman" right before Stefani comes back in? I've always thought so.

The song has a nice little narrative, too, about a dude named Haji (a Pakistani, maybe?), a punk who is playing at the local pub when Trevor (a skin) comes in with his boys and doesn't take kindly to such. They scuffle in the pub, set a time to brawl later, then as they both are severely hurt (as Trevor had "nunchucks" and Haji had "a sword like the guy in Indiana Jones") and abandoned by their crews, they spy the North Star, Haji makes a tourniquet from his turban to save Trevor, the guys make up and go bond over shots of bourbon (which, conveniently, is a liquor that rhymes with "turban").

Say what you will about No Doubt (and I know some of you will), but you can't deny that by the time this song was released they had become a pretty solid, tight band. They also eventually outgrew the pop / ska thing and had some really nice tunes on the underrated "Return of Saturn" and their (seemingly) final album, "Rock Steady". If you seriously hate them, I think you can still safely enjoy this song once a year.

Embedding disabled by request, so click here for the video.

Here's the Vandals performing the original:


And here's the song so you can include it on all those cool Christmas mixes everyone likes to make:
http://www.mediafire.com/?zjm2dkikf3j