Swedish Couple Hates Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’, So They’re Trying to Buy the Rights to It
Have you ever hated a song so much you'd do anything to get it off the air forever? One Swedish couple is raising money to do just that.
Christmas is usually a time for cheer, but a few of the seasonal classics are not the brightest and cheeriest you could find. One such song is Wham's "Last Christmas," which tells the tale of someone who gave their heart to another, only for that person to reject them and go to someone else.
Yes, it's not the ideal Christmas song. It's pretty depressing and can bring the mood down. That's what made it perfect for Taylor Swift to cover.
But it seems that there's someone out there who is going above and beyond to crush the souls of anyone who likes the song.
Tomas Mazetti, 50, and his wife, Hannah, 33, have reportedly raised more than $62,000 to buy the rights to Wham!’s “Last Christmas” — so they can take it off the air for good.
Hannah said her hatred of the 1984 tinsel tune began 13 years ago when she worked in a cafe in Oxford, England, where her boss allegedly played the cheer-worm on repeat.
“I was studying English and worked extra to pay the bills. The owner of the cafe had planned for a super cozy holiday season and had his own-made CD with a number of ‘hits’ on it,” Hannah, a painter who lives in Sweden, recalled to SWNS.
So, this couple, from Gothenburg, Sweden, has raised roughly $62,000 so far to try to buy the rights to the song, but the problem for them is that those rights, currently owned by Warner Chappell Music UK, are valued between $15 million and $25 million. So it's quite the uphill battle.
This just feels like an attack on Christmas itself. Attacking the music of the season, even a non-traditional piece of that season, is absurd. Plus, look at how many times it gets played on Christmas Eve over the years.
That's not including how many plays it gets during the rest of the season. It's become increasingly popular (which may or may not be saying something about society's overall emotional health) and anyone trying to take it away just seems like trying to steal Christmas, and as we learned from the Grinch, that leads to half-baked schemes that don't work.
It's not like there's any real danger of it happening, though, which is good. It's just like book banning. No one who attempts something like this has ever been on the right side of history.
So, to celebrate what will likely be an unsuccessful attempt to remove this song from society, here's my favorite non-Wham version of the song.