I first heard the 12-minute “Christmas Unicorn” a few days ago, while my family and I were getting ready for a Christmas visit to my father’s home. I was streaming Silver and Gold, Sufjan Stevens’s 59-track (!) Christmas collection from 2012, when “Unicorn” came on. Its slow build and its insistent, seemingly endless, repeating refrain bowled me over:

I’m the Christmas Unicorn
I’m the Christmas Unicorn*
You’re the Christmas Unicorn
It’s all right, I love you!

And that’s before the song slips into a sing-along of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” compounding my delight with further surprise. This is a gambit that Stevens frequently uses, the extending and amping-up of recurring melodies till they generate, through their repetitions, overwhelming waves of sound and choral celebration, resulting in something just shy of chaos. (Cf. “Impossible Soul” and “All Delighted People.”)

My personal, auditory enjoyment, of course, is not the only thing generated by Stevens’s technique. “I’m a Christmas Unicorn: A musicological and theological analysis of Sufjan Stevens’s song, ‘Christmas Unicorn‘” is an 83-page undergraduate thesis produced in 2014 by one Janna Martindale, who currently, near as I can tell, plays violin in various collectives in the greater Austin area.

Written for Baylor University’s Honors College, Martindale’s thesis exhaustively explores the historical, pop-cultural, and theological meanings of the song. The writing is breezy, clear, and often insightful. For example, take this bit of analysis on the song’s musical construction of the song:

The coda of “Christmas Unicorn” demonstrates the musical process of polyphonic layering. While the music is more electronic and shifted more to commercialism, Stevens is using medieval polyphonic ideas that focus more on melodies rather than vertical harmonies. I have transcribed the melodies from the five different themes used in the song: verse, contrapuntal melody, refrain, refrain sung by unicorn choir, and the quotation of the chorus from “Love will tear us apart” by Joy Division. Sometimes, only one of these melodies is sung and other times, all are sung at once. 

This is followed by an illustration of Martindale’s musical transcription. Since I can’t read music, I do not know what it means, but I trust the author.

And here is Martindale on “Unicorn’s” Joy Division digression:

The “mechanistic drumming” by [Joy Division drummer] Stephen Morris, the mid range tempo, and the “wave of haunting synthesizers” from “Love will tear us apart” are all mimicked in the second half of “Christmas Unicorn.” First, Stevens quotes only a slightly simplified version of the chorus melody. Then the “Love will tear us apart” quotation turns into one melody in the polyphony. “Christmas Unicorn” starts off as a song about seemingly harmless subject matter, but Stevens shows that love is not a wholly complacent thing. Love tore Christ’s body apart. Even though suicide is a perverted form of death, it still mimics the sacrifice of Christ’s death for love. Dorothy Sayers says, “‘the sterner side of love’ is the power that must be ‘present in the artist’s attitude to his work.’”17 “The sterner side of love” is definitely present in Stevens’s creation of the song, “Christmas Unicorn,” and the inclusion of the lyrics, “Love will tear us apart.”

On the swirling repetition of the song’s refrain, Martindale writes,

The lyric booklet says “[repeat ad nauseum]” after the chorus. To repeat ad nauseum means to repeat until it makes one sick. An onslaught of Christmas lights, mall Santas, and sweets can make one nauseous. Ralph Wood has suggested that this may be a play on the words “repeat ad gloria” often used to describe Christian music, which means “to the glory of God.” Stevens is creating a link between the oversaturation of Christmas commercialism with angelic singing of holy songs to God. Even though gaudy Christmas decorations are not ideal, Stevens links the commercialism of Christmas with the praise of God through song. His song incorporates the gaudiness of Christmas with its sound mass and polyphony. 

And on the Christian symbolism of the unicorn itself:

Perhaps the Christmas Unicorn is a model of deification. The Anglican emphasis on deification comes from the Orthodox belief in theosis, the doctrine that human are intended to participate in God’s own life. “Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”  This passage reveals that God intends for Christians to share in the divine nature of God. 

The beauty of the thesis, aside from the fact that its writing avoids a stodgy academic-ese, is how it demonstrates that attention can help us see how in the words we use, and the objects we encounter, is contained the history and the lives that made them. I’m reminded of these lines by Li-Young Lee, from his poem “Blossoms,” about eating a peach from a roadside stand:

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

Another thing recommending the thesis: How rare it is to get your hands on an academic text that contains images like this:

Do yourself a favor, if you have the time: Listen to the song. Then read the thesis.

~

[*In various outlets online, the second line of the refrain is given to be “Find the Christmas Unicorn,” which may be correct.]