'Self Indulgent Blasphemy': Kim Kardashian Under Fire After Releasing Grotesque Christmas Music Video
If you’re into reality TV schadenfreude and haven’t been Keeping Up with the Kardashians™ lately, I bring glad tidings this Christmas season: Kim has somehow found a new way to debase herself — and our society’s way of celebrating the Savior’s birth along with it — even more thoroughly than she already has!
In a music video drawing equal parts scorn, derision, and righteous anger from various parts of the internet, Kardashian attempts to warble her way through a version of “Santa Baby” — already a song with a rather worldly take on Christmas, but this time delivered in such a creepy manner that it’s like it was being covered by Radiohead if God decided, for whatever reason, to remove all of Radiohead’s talent and put a tuneless, talentless celebrity Barbie doll on vocals in place of Thom Yorke.
Also, it features Macaulay Culkin as a weirdo Santa Claus filming the debauchery — and that’s the most normal thing about the video, somehow
Australian outlet The Music described the video as “one of the weirdest things you will ever watch,” which is one of the nicer takes. The song itself, which is a markedly worse rendition of the Eartha Kitt original, was produced by Travis Barker — drummer for Blink-182 and Kim’s brother-in-law. (He’s married to sister Kourtney.)
It’s the video that’s getting most of the talk, though. It’s directed by Nadia Lee Cohen, a British visual artist best known for her work with Tyler, the Creator, A$AP Rocky, and Katy Perry, inter alia. Say what you will about that trio — none of them are exactly going to cut a memorable Christmas standard, that’s for sure — at least they’re talented at what they do. Kim isn’t.
If discomfiture was Cohen’s aim, at least we can say she’s talented at that. The effect, to paraphrase an insult from the movie-mockery show “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” is that every frame of “Santa Baby” a la Kardashian looks like somebody’s last-known photograph.
The nearly five-minute clip features Kardashian, skimpily attired, crawling through what appears to be a yule celebration in the eighth circle of Hell:
WARNING: The following video contains graphic footage and unsettling themes that some viewers will find offensive.
SANTA BABY
FILM DIRECTED BY NADIA LEE COHEN & CHARLIE DENIS
SONG PRODUCED BY TRAVIS BARKER pic.twitter.com/zp2Oyvj24Q
— Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) December 23, 2024
Describing the video scene by scene is pretty pointless; if there is meaning behind this lurid, demonic-tinged imagery, Kardashian and Cohen have been unkind enough not to give us any particularly clues what it means. I suspect, however, it is exactly what it seems like it is: provocative but shiftlessly incoherent.
Fittingly, nobody seemed to really like this; you had to search deep, deep into the comments section to find any Kim partisans who thought this was secretly brilliant stuff.
The dominant mood seemed to be incredulousness, summed up best by Instagram comments like “Did I just do acid?” and “I think I just watched Kim crawl through a crackhouse.”
Is that @IncredibleCulk at the end?? What did I just watch?? 😳 pic.twitter.com/4ZY4VCHnED
— Dustin Burnham (@dustinthedad) December 23, 2024
The second camp went further into outright mockery:
This is what happens when you have Zero talent and all the money in the world
You post an acid trip and think that it’s music
— Zinan The VIII (@TheZinan) December 23, 2024
Weimar Republic era art sucks.
— Shane Hunter 🐇 (@Shane_Hunter) December 24, 2024
— Moultrie Patriot 🏴☠️ (@M0ultriePatriot) December 23, 2024
Kim, blink twice if you need help
— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) December 23, 2024
thank you so much
my uncle was unable to walk but when he heard this he got up to turn this off
— XHabib (@RealXHabib) December 23, 2024
And then there was a third group, which thought that making a mockery of the birth of Christ through whatever this wannabe Warhol piffle aspired to be was yet another symbol of degeneracy and debasement in a West that has lost sight of God:
you’re 44 years old and have 4 kids
find God
— juju 💰 (@ayeejuju) December 23, 2024
Disgusting, degenerate, self indulgent blasphemy. God will not be mocked.
— Jayda Fransen (@JaydaBF) December 23, 2024
Why does this feel like they’re just mocking Christmas?
Patiently waiting for someone to dissect the symbolism here 🤨
— MELA BEE (@melabeeofficial) December 23, 2024
You’ll be waiting a while.
To be fair to Kim, it’s not as if “Santa Baby” has ever embraced the Reason for the Season™; it’s a paean to undisguised greed where the singer would likely only express interest in what happened 2,000-odd years ago in a manger in Bethlehem if that manger were reproduced, full scale, in sterling silver and diamonds by Tiffany & Co. Some have tried to pass it off as ironic or, even more cringeworthily, as a female empowerment anthem. Whatever you take it as, let’s be clear: Kim didn’t exactly slink her way through “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
That being said, I referenced Radiohead earlier in the video because what this video reminded me of most, on first viewing, was the 1997 video for that band’s “Paranoid Android.” I’m not going to embed it here, because it manages to be even weirder and more unnerving, but it’s easy enough to look up on YouTube should you so choose.
The point of that video, however, was pretty straightforward: This isn’t normal. This is weird. This is an aberration. And we need to start looking at ourselves and what our culture produces before it becomes normal.
Kim Kardashian’s message, nearest I can tell from this clip: This is now normal. To the extent it’s weird, it’s still a valid way of seeking attention, which is basically the only artistic currency Kim has shown herself capable of minting. Also, attaching this attention-seeking discomfiture to one of the two holiest days in the Christian religion for added impact is a valid way to mint more of that attention.
This is one of those cases where the comments section is right. Kim, you’re 44 with four children. Find God. Find truth. Find wisdom. And find a place in this world where you can flourish without needing public attention — good or bad (but mostly bad) — merely to exist.
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