Bootsy Collins, in much better days.

Um, releasing an album called Christmas Is 4 Ever (out Oct. 31 on Shout! Factory). Not a good look, Bootsy, but more on that later.

You should all know that this Cincinnati cat’s musical legacy is effin’ huge: for laying down some of the funkiest bass lines ever for James Brown (1969-71) and Parliament-Funkadelic (1972-79), plus for parts of his first three Rubber Band albums and contributions to Deee-lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart,”� Bootsy Collins deserves all the sex, drugs, money, and respect that have come his way—and then some. But with Christmas Is 4 Ever, Bootsy has succumbed to the lowest form of temptation to which a musician can descend (no, he didn’t sleep with Courtney Love): he cut a goddamned Christmas album.

Let me make myself clear: I think Christmas music is the most annoying music ever—worse even than third-wave ska, nü-metal, or “Yellow Submarine.”� Besides its trite tunes, lyrics that make me want to crush the brains that conceived them, and its enabling of the celebration of a holiday that makes millions of Christian fundies and their slightly less despicable and self-righteous brethren feel smug about their misguided beliefs, xmas music also is inextricably associated with the hollow cha-ching of consumerist gluttony. (The last-named element is actually the most tolerable aspect of this scenario. In fact, I encourage this over-indulgent spending orgy. Onward, Christian shoppers!)

Like suckers in a vast Pavlovian experiment that occurs for one-sixth of each year, Americans spend beyond their means, spurred by a combination of economic obligation, familial expectation, relentless peer/advertising pressure—and the maddeningly incessant broadcast of xmas tuneage that fills the air like some superficially innocuous yet actually toxic gas.

What really irks me most about this sorry state of affairs is the annual agonizing repetition of the same handful of maudlin songs that sugarcoat the biggest holiday of an ideology that has led to a grotesque amount of suffering, persecution, and death over the millennia. (Bear with me: beating this rhetorical dead horse is necessary from time to time for optimal mental health. Also, I realize there are good Christians; trouble is, they’re drowned out by the repugnant zealots. We’ve got too much Pat Robertson and DUHbya in the monitors, you know what I’m sayin’?)

Xmas carols are kitsch in the service of a world-endangering belief system that has been hijacked by its most intolerant adherents. It’s not cute or funny anymore—hasn’t been for decades. Please, in the name of all that is sane and reasonable, STFU, makers and players of xmas music (and you, too, Pat Robertson).

Now, I have some good friends who just love the shit out of xmas music; I pray that one of these days they’ll come to their senses. However, as someone who observed both Hanukkah and xmas in his metro Detroit youth and is of Syrian Christian/Latvian Jewish descent (which somehow led me to becoming an agnostic at an early age; go figure), I feel I am especially qualified to comment on the galling aspects of this holiday and its reprehensible music.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, Bootsy. Dude, it breaks my heart that you’ve sunk to this level of desperation. I know you have family to feed, but, jeebus, couldn’t you have found a more dignified way to put food on the table than this travesty of quarter-assed funk vamps and shameless vocal hamming? Shit, I need to immediately put on “Cosmic Slop,”� “One Nation Under a Groove,”� and “(Not Just) Knee Deep”� to wipe out the unholy stench of your wrong-headed venture. “WinterFunkyLand”� my ass”¦