A St. Patrick’s Day request: Please stop overplaying ‘Shipping up to Boston’
Photo by Chase Agnello-Dean/NHLI via Getty Images
Your holiday playlists need some work. We need to discuss something that happened Tuesday night at the United Center.
Yes, the Chicago Blackhawks beat the Boston Bruins that night, a result as stunning as any from this hockey season. But we’ve already discussed all angles of that development.
No, there was something else that happened at 1901 W. Madison that needs to be addressed, a series of occurrences that can be easily summarized by the tweet below from Mark Lazerus of The Athletic, who documented the event(s).
SEVEN. #ShippingUpToBostonCounter #MakeItStopForTheLoveOfGod— Mark Lazerus (@MarkLazerus) March 15, 2023
Seven. Times.
Over the course of Tuesday’s night’s events, the Dropkick Murphys’ song “Shipping up to Boston” was played seven freaking times. We’ve turned this band and this song into the St. Patrick’s Day version of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” — an annual assault on the eardrums of retail employees everywhere.
Let’s be clear, though: this is no slight against the band itself. The Murphys are a perfectly fine band, with a discography that goes miles past this one track. Few songs are a better accompaniment for driving around with the windows down on a summer afternoon than “Sunshine Highway” from the band’s 2005 album “The Warrior’s Code.”
It’s a band worthy of respect for things beyond their music, too. Lead singer Ken Casey once jumped from the stage to confront a concert-goer who Casey witnessed elbowing women in the crowd during a 2019 show and still finished the set despite being bloodied by a beer can during the scrap. A few months into the pandemic, they raised over $700,000 for multiple charities while playing a show in an empty Fenway Park that was streamed online for free. It’s a consistently pro-union, pro-labor, anti-Nazi band.
But it’s not the only band from Boston. It’s not the only band with Irish influences in their music. It’s not the only band that can be played on St. Patrick’s Day. One simple request on Twitter yielded a slew of other bands with plenty of songs that would be just as acceptable on this green-clad holiday. Flogging Molly. The Pogues. The Tossers (who are from Chicago!). The Dubliners. Gaelic Storm. Sir Reg.
Or just run through this every song this band ever made:
The one saving grace from our annual auditory overdose on Mariah Carey in December is that there are a plethora of other holiday songs that can offer some a break from the constant deluge of that song.
So, if we’re gonna keep playing “Shipping Up to Boston” on this day — and let’s face the reality that it’s not going away anytime soon — let’s at least expand our playlists of Irish-associated musical acts to keep this one song from being played seven times in a stretch of roughly four hours.
Or, tonight: there’s gonna be a jailbreak.
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