Jordan Smith - "Mary Did You Know" (#24)
The tradition of having a #1 Christmas single seems to be a British institution; when I watched Love, Actually over the holidays with my family there was a considerable subplot about Bill Nighy's character, an aging rockstar, doing a publicity tour to promote his new Christmas single to take the top holiday spot. And then, of course, there was the furor in 2011 when a grassroots campaign took Rage Against the Machine's “Killing in the Name” to #1 in protest of the continual domination of Christmas singles by whoever the latest X-Factor winner was.
Which is the format that Jordan Smith's “Mary Did You Know” seems to exist in – a Christmas standard recorded by the winner of a televised singing program. I don't have much to say about The Voice, which is the program in question. I've not watched it, but it seems self-evidently superior to American Idol (formerly a country-dominating institution that is being mercifully put out to pasture this next year). What's notable about The Voice is that, for all its commercial success, it's never produced a genuine star. Sure, American Idol gave us some truly mediocre artists like Carrie Underwood, Chris Daughtry, and Jordin Sparks, but even years after their appearances on the show those artists continue to maintain a commercial and popular relevance that none of the winners of The Voice even had in the first place.
Sure enough, I don't expect that to change for Jordan Smith. Right now he sits at #24, and the #1 song, as it has been for eight weeks, is Adele's “Hello”. This particular tune will drop off the charts rapidly, and Jordan Smith will come out with his debut album around October, hopefully with some original songs. Because, strangely, that's what you need to succeed as a singer with a reputation for having a great, distinctive singing voice – original songs. It's what Adele has done, after all, and she's dominating the world right now.
And you can see why that would be a preferable alternative to this. It doesn't help that “Mary Did You Know” was never a good song in the first place – its only value as a Christmas song compared to all the others is as a demonstration of vocal skill. Even then, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is the better song you could use for that purpose, but also by far the more overplayed. So this is a sensible pick – an easy song to show off Jordan Smith's chops.
But it also misses the point – there's a reason why the most iconic version of this song is from Kenny Rogers and Wynona Judd, neither of which are singers renowned for their terrific voices, at least not to the exclusion of their songwriting sensibilities and other talents. Rogers and Judd fight like hell to make the song feel personal and inspirational, against the song's inherent glurge and sappiness. That they succeed is a testament to their passion for it, however misplaced.
In Smith's hands, it flounders, but of course it would. He hits all the notes perfectly and gives a performance that at once belies his considerable skill while also never even coming close to going overboard. But he can't save the song.
What is it about the song that's so bad, anyway? For my money, the best straightforwardly religious songs tend to trade in a kind of bright-eyed ecstasy – see Hank Williams's “I Saw the Light” for the best example of this. “Mary Did You Know”, though, is didactic in the extreme. No, worse – it's patronizing. The exhortation of the song's title repeats throughout and only serves to ingrain the idea that we, the listener, are the ones being told about the glory of Jesus by the singer, who is of course put on a pedestal above us because of his total knowledge of the Lord's works. It is the closest any popular religious song has ever dared to come to sounding like a sermon, and sermons were always my least favorite part of church services.
I don't have a particular aversion to Jordan Smith, nor to singing competitions in general, but that's the trick with “Mary Did You Know”. You have to, like Kenny Rogers and Wynona Judd, pack your vocal delivery with tics and decisions to communicate the ideal tone of passionate evangelizing that works best with it. Jordan Smith's problem here is that he plays it too straight, that he hasn't realized what basically everybody else in the world has already: “Mary Did You Know” kinda sucks.
C-
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