Lil Tjay & Fivio Foreign Cover Wham!'s "Last Christmas": Listen

This year, Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” displaced Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” as the dominant #1 hit of the holiday season, but plenty of other Christmas standards are waiting in the wings. One of them is Wham!’s 1984 classic “Last Christmas,” which is currently sitting at #4 on the Hot 100 and which gets more cover versions every year. This year, Alanis Morisette and Coco & Clair Clair have released “Last Christmas” covers; they join a list that includes Boris, the xx, Future Islands, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Lucy Dacus. Now, rowdy New York rappers Lil Tjay and Fivio Foriegn have joined the party.

Lil Tjay and Fivio Foreign’s new single “Last Christmas” isn’t a Wham! cover in the classic sense. Fivio Foreign isn’t out here trying to hit George Michael notes. Instead, they’ve used the track as the basis for a piece of horny New York sample drill. Check out the video below.

In other news, the BBC reports that Matt Facer, DJ for the British soccer team Northampton Town, has apologized for playing “Last Christmas” during a game against Portsmouth earlier this month. Apparently, people do a thing called Whamageddon where they try to get through the holiday season without hearing “Last Christmas” once, and Facer spoiled those plans for more than 7,000 people. Facer says that his act was premeditated: “I never knew people took it so seriously… I gave it a spin, thinking it would be quite funny to wipe out 7,000 people who couldn’t avoid it, but clearly it isn’t funny.”

I don’t know why anyone would bother taking part in Whamageddon, but if you’re doing it, apparently covers don’t count. You can enjoy the Lil Tjay/Fivio Foreign track, and you can also watch Alanis Morissette sing her version of “Last Christmas” on The Tonight Show a few days ago.