My “Time of Death” in this year’s Mariahpocalypse came relatively early. It was Dec. 4, at 8:56 p.m., and I was taken out when her song was used in the background of a reel I scrolled across on Facebook, which – as far as I can tell – only popped up on my page at all because the person who made it was showing off a Christmas Supergirl costume and had tagged James Gunn. I am, however, still active in Whamageddon as of this writing.
If none of that makes sense to you, let me explain. Whamageddon is a little game that has become popular at Christmastime over the last few years. The goal is to try to make it from December 1st until midnight on Christmas Eve without hearing the song “Last Christmas” by Wham! It’s not easy. They play the song on the radio all the time. It can pop up on the speakers in a store when you’re out shopping. The song exists in aerosol form, floating through the air, and at any moment may attack you like a swarm of angry hornets. Only the original recording counts, mind you – covers are fair game – but as soon as you recognize the song, you’ve lost. An optional rule is reporting your “Time of Death” on social media when it happens. Mariahpocalypse is, of course, the same game, but substitutes the song “All I Want For Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey, a song which is so ubiquitous at this time of year that odds are you have already heard it seven times while reading this paragraph.
Why those songs specifically? A friend of mine asked this the other day, even sharing the YouTube link to the “Last Christmas” music video. (Don’t worry – I didn’t click on it. Just seeing the link doesn’t eliminate you from the game, only hearing the song does.) His argument was that it doesn’t make sense because it’s “a great song.” And you know, it’s really not bad. It wouldn’t be on my top ten list of Christmas songs, but it’s certainly not at the bottom. That space is solely reserved for John Lennon, whose “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” is so gratingly depressing and self-absorbed that it has ironically been banned by the Geneva Conventions. As for Mariah – YOU might not like that song, but it’s clear that SOMEBODY does, because even now, 31 years after the song’s initial release, Forbes magazine estimates that she makes between $2.5 million and $3 million every year in royalties from that alone. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, keep in mind that the music industry is very different than it used to be. Sales of physical media are meager now, and to make $3 million on streaming a song would have to be played – and this is not a joke, I looked it up – approximately 687,000,000 times. That means every person in the United States would have to stream it at least TWICE, including your Great Aunt Mildred, who thinks that “streaming” is something she needs to talk to her urologist about.
So the problem is obviously not that people don’t like it. I would argue that the reason Wham and Mariah have been targeted by this game is actually the opposite: they are TOO popular. So popular that, unless you’re really a fan of the songs or the musicians themselves, they start to get on your nerves. The songs, simply, have been overexposed.
The truth is, any media runs the risk of an overdose if you see it too much. Last year, for example, my son discovered the Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series on Paramount+, and he fell in love with it. The show is a spinoff of the feature film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem from 2023, picking up where the movie left off and keeping the same tone, animated style, and most of the voice cast. I’d enjoyed the movie and I was quite happy to discover that I enjoyed the show as well.
The first time.
But as anyone with children can tell you, if a kid really likes something they don’t want to watch it just once. Oh no. They cycle back to the beginning and start over again. And this is what Eddie started to do. Once he reached the end of the final episode, he’d roll right into episode 1 and start watching the show over, to the point of excluding everything else. For over a month, Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the only thing he wanted to watch AT ALL, and even though I liked the show, I got tired of it VERY fast. It was made worse by the fact that there is only one season of the show so far, only 12 episodes, so he could cycle through the entire thing VERY quickly. I would pick him up from school and when he’d get home he would immediately go back to whatever episode he was watching when he was bundled out the door that morning. When it got to the point that my wife and I were saying the jokes out loud to one another ahead of time, we knew something had to be done. We tried to convince him to try other Ninja Turtle cartoons – there are, and this is a rough estimate, 17 trillion of them — and even if it was still all mutants all the time, it would be nice to at least not have to watch the same 12 episodes over and over. These efforts were met with failure however. After an episode or two of whatever show we put in front of him, he would invariably demand that we cycle back to Tales. Adding the movie into the rotation only gave us slight relief.
This is the point in the story where certain members of the audience are thinking, “Well YOU are the adults. Why didn’t you just TELL him to watch something else?” These are a very specific subset of audience members that I like to refer to as “people who do not have children.” The rest of the audience knows EXACTLY why we didn’t just tell him to watch something else. Regardless, this went on for some time until football season started up and he was distracted by sports, finally breaking the cycle.
For some reason, we experienced this same phenomenon again THIS year, except this time instead of the Turtles, it was reruns of the game show Supermarket Sweep. I’m already trying to find a strategy to distract him after the Super Bowl this year so we don’t get stuck again.
The point is, even the best cartoon, movie, or song will become tedious if you are exposed to it too often. The human brain craves variety. We want to be entertained, yes, but entertainment is often predicated on surprise, on the unpredictability of what we’re watching. Sure, there’s such a thing as a “comfort show.” Shows like Friends, The Office, or Bob’s Burgers have devoted, almost militant fan bases that can just keep watching those shows over and over again, watching almost nothing else. In fact, there have been studies that indicate watching a comfort show is a way of relieving anxiety, because you know what’s coming and because revisiting them fires the same chemicals in the brain as you get from spending time with family and friends. That’s right – you love going back to the Belcher family because your brain thinks it’s your OWN family.
However, you may notice that the shows that make this list – that echelon where a devoted section of the fan base can cycle through them again and again – are almost exclusively shows that were produced for many years. Friends had 236 episodes, The Office 201, and Bob’s Burgers – which is still on the air and still in production – aired episode #305 last weekend. Even if you picked one of these shows and watched nothing else, it would take the average person with a job and normal activities weeks or even months to get through the entire thing before you would cycle back to episode one. Fans of one-season wonders like Firefly may love their show, but I don’t know any Browncoats who just watch the 14 episodes and one movie over and over again without any other entertainment in their life.
There’s also, if we’re being totally honest here, a bit of a hipsterish anti-popularity vibe when it comes to things that become true cultural icons. If you were alive at any point in the last dozen or so years, you may have heard of a little Disney movie called Frozen. It doesn’t matter if you personally have had children or were a child at any point in this time period, it was absolutely inescapable. A month before the movie came out we all had the soundtrack beamed directly into our brains telepathically. The movie won awards, it produced a mountain of merchandise, and John Travolta somehow egregiously mangling Idina Menzel’s name at the Oscars is perhaps the most entertaining thing that has happened at the award ceremony in the last three decades, or at least until they accidentally tried to give “Best Picture” to La La Land that one time.
But with the indisputable popularity of Frozen came a backlash. If you say that you like that movie in modern company, you WILL be met with a certain derision. People will tell you that THEY never thought it was THAT good. Mention how you appreciated the fact that it didn’t have a traditional “Disney Princess”-style love story and someone will appear behind you as though you’d said “Candyman” three times in order to inform you that Wreck-It Ralph and Big Hero Six didn’t have love stories either. Start humming a few bars of “Let it Go” and a coven of Disney Witches will try to trap you in a circle and summon the ghost of Lin-Manuel Miranda, which REALLY irritates him because he’s still alive.
But the thing is, guys, Frozen is a good movie. Like, it objectively is. The animation is gorgeous, the songs are catchy and memorable, the vocal performances by Menzel and Kristen Bell are phenomenal, and the story is not only atypical of what we expected from a Disney Princess movie but at the same time was profoundly moving and had a wonderful message about love and acceptance. But you absolutely are not allowed to say that in certain circles without somebody grinding up a DVD of Tangled into powder and trying to force you to snort a line.
The point is, it’s okay to get tired of something. If you watch or listen to anything too often, odds are you’re going to want to put it aside and watch something else, and that’s perfectly fine. That’s normal. It’s even okay if you get so sick of something that you never want to watch it again. But that’s not an actual metric of QUALITY. Sure, there are some things whose popularity is inexplicable, but you’re not a better person than somebody else because you don’t like them. And while games like Whamageddon are fun, that shouldn’t be taken as a statement that the songs are bad, just that they’ve maybe gotten a little more air time than we would like.
And you know the good thing about losing Mariahpocalypse on Dec. 4? That means I’ve got three whole weeks until Christmas in which I’m safe to listen to the song as much as I want.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He hasn’t watched the movie, but he suspects that a lot of the comments he’s made about overexposure could also be applied to the film K-Pop Demon Hunters.
Blake M. Petit 