LISTEN: Laptop cover Tom Waits's 'Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis'

Y’know, I’m glad people the likes of Tom Waits and NYC’s Laptop get that this is a bullshit time of year. Oh, I don’t hate Christmas or any humbug-ass thing like that. It’s just that Christmas comes at a shitty time of year. Parents and other sociopaths have to work, and business owners have year-end junk to handle. Everybody who even has health insurance has finally covered their deductible, and they’re rushing to docs so the damn insurance company actually pays for something. Sure, young folks love Christmas, but a lot of them have a bunch of finals to sweat before they get a break. And don’t get me started on shopping, shipping, and idyllic social media images of the ‘perfect holiday table’ and other mythological phenomena.

So I celebrate Laptop’s jazz-robotic take on Tom Waits’s beloved holiday anti-carol, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis.” This is a Christmas story from the North Pole’s squalid east side, where Santa rolls open-carry style and the best of them hit a meeting on Christmas Eve. Waits’s tragic lyric clings to the hopeless belief that better days might come in the new year. His hooker’s lies are no more pernicious than the lies that are spun in TV commercials and endless Hallmark movies this time of year. And at least she has the common decency to admit that it’s all bullshit.

I dig the video, featuring Laptop frontman Jesse Hartman shuffling around New York’s Rockefeller Center and 5th Avenue with a scruffy beard, shades, and a Santa hat. The juxtaposition of the hooker’s tawdry yarn, with perfect New York City Christmas shopping and happy holiday revelers, presents an apt paradox.

Laptop’s version features a Salvation Army trumpet and a melancholy violin, punctuated by the gun-shot crack of the snare. Layer on a bit of electro-distortion, and the production feels true to the spirit of Waits’s peppy Bowery dirge. Jesse recently revived Laptop, which had three acclaimed indie releases in the early naughties. He now co-fronts with his son, Charlie. (I had a weird vision of Jesse singing this about his son, who might have received such a letter.)

And if you’ve forgotten how Tom originally plied this number, check him out at Austin City Limits in 1978, featuring a “Silent Night” intro. Merry Christmas, you filthy animals!