Annie Lennox Christmas Cornucopia, Beyond Great!

This has got to be one of the greatest triumphs ever in Popular Music. Annie Lennox was not just aiming at Christmas Mode Music, no, she was obviously going after ringing up humanity's most sublime feelings and emotions, ranging from pathos through exuberance to rapture and then even transcendent ecstasy. Christmas, in the conception of Annie Lennox's Christmas Cornucopia, is not only not just the big secular holiday it has become for most of us, and it is not even simply a Christian Religious Holiday, but goes on to become a monumental Universal Event and a pivotal and central Experience for All Mankind. It depicts God as Pure Innocence coming into the World through Suffering in order to relieve Suffering and to auger in a New Pure World where everything is right and we all finally agree to make all things Fair. The songs are riddled with these messages, along with Angelic Choirs, and blaring crescendos of Messianic Promise. We have songs about frozen moments of Satori Experience. We have songs of Christmas, the Divine Birth in the Present Tense, Songs of Christmas as prophecy of some fabulous future event. There is not much looking back, as the Christmas Cornucopia is looking more at Christmas as a huge Existential Now. A final song penned by Annie Lennox goes so far as to introduce a New Conception of God and Theology - that God is as much slowed down and encumbered by the Material World as we all are, but with all of our Active Help, with the Wind and Current of God's Purpose at our backs pushing us forward to reach our own highest levels of voluntary Goodness, Divinity in all of its Perfection can finally be made to Shine Through and uplift our World, fulfilling that Ancient Messianic Christmas Promise.

Be careful playing this CD in your car. This is not just foot-tapping music. You may be taken up well beyond the concern for Red and Green lights, and it may be difficult to see the traffic flow through the fog of your tears of wonder.

This CD came out a few years back in 2010, and I had played it last year, for more than a month. This year I was almost afraid to dig it out of the CD pile. What if the Magic I remembered had worn off? But, no. if anything, it was more intense than ever. I knew where all the ecstatic triggers were and was ready to respond.

Oh, you may think I am very suggestible and am simply a sucker for Christmas Music. Well, don't you think I thought the same thing myself ? So I got everybodies' Christmas CDs. Well, most were not bad, well, except for Aimee Mann's "Just Another Drifter in the Snow", so cynical and bitter that one fears that Ms. Mann has come to thoroughly believe all her own Market-niche balderdash - that disgusted, disgruntled, sarcastic and sardonic People would simply love to have their own taste in Christmas Music, making it an odd curio for what must be a new low for our collapsing Civilization. She has obviously given up on any `Rescue'. Oh, don't get me wrong! I love Aimee Mann... or I guess I used to. It is true her other CDs are beginning to pile up dust - since the horrible taste of her Christmas Album hasn't really gotten out of my mouth yet, I really haven't had the hankering to play any of her other `stuff'. Well, enough about Ms. Mann, and on to the better Christmas Records. Well, not even the better Christmas CD's were getting even close to tossing me up into the Sky as Annie Lennox's Christmas Cornucopia had been doing. So, no, it is not just Christmas, it is Annie Lennox's Artistic Vision of Christmas, and her willingness and ability to take on that Mystical and Enraptured Persona that could effectively drive it all Home. Oh, and there is in a number of songs the appearance of the South African Children's Choir, or as many of them as she could fly to London for the recording sessions - wonderfully talented and obviously very well disciplined, as the material given to these kids could not have possibly been wrapped up in one `take' and more and more must have been demanded of them, and they marched on like little troupers and delivered the absolute best.

As far as Annie Lennox goes, after they completed this Project, I simply do not understand how she could possibly NOT have exploded into a Flash of Absolute White Light that would have certainly Illuminated the entire Planet to bring us all to our better senses. But maybe it just needs a bit more time. Anyway it will probably help to buy one for yourself, and then get one for a friend. Perhaps we all have to first Hear the Vision before we can See the Vision.