Written by Rebecca Winson
Friday, 18 December 2009 07:10
F**k You! I won’t do what you tell me! I’m buying Rage Against the Machine! Oh.. er... hang on. Fu**k you! I’m definitely not doing what you tell me! I’m not buying Rage Against the Machine! Yeah! Ha! Oh... wait a minute. F**k you! I won’t do you what you tell me either! I am buying Rage Against the Machine! Damnit!
I won’t do what anyone tells me! I’m going to sit here and moan about the whole thing in an ironic, cynical, world weary sort of way, which is oh so popular in the sixth form common room at the moment.
Yes, apologies. Another bit of internet gumbo about the race for Christmas number one. Unless you’ve had your head under a stone and plugs in your ears for the last week, you’ll already be well acquainted with the fact that a Facebook campaign group has succeeded in getting the testosterone and Chomsky fuelled gurning rock rappers Rage Against the Machine thousands of copies ahead of the X-factor’s latest plodding bit of bumfluff: Joe “Isn’t He Lovely” McElderry’s version of an achingly awful Miley Cyrus track.
You’re probably even more acquainted with the millions of spitting internet comments and debates blistering over every site from the Telegraph’s to the NME’s, and now onto Se7en. Not one surfer worth their status update has been able to go without adding their few sentences of opinion to the mix. They range from the predictable to the rantings of the clinically insane. You’d expect they’d largely be split into two camps: the Joes and the Ragers. This isn’t strictly true.
There are a scattering of die hard X-factorites out there, but they’re few and far between. Even on the Sun’s dedicated X Factor minisite, the majority of posters were on the side of the facebook campaign. The real debate seems to be amongst the group you’d feel would stick together on this one: the rock snobs. Half are wholeheartedly backing the campaign, seeing it as a chance to oust the inane, sugar sweet ramblings of yet another of Cowell’s puppets. The others, so their endless postings and twitterings and status updatings tell us, couldn’t care less and are of course very coolly above the whole thing, for two reasons. One: the campaign is hypocritical and useless, as RATM are just as commercial as the X-Factor, and two: the Christmas number one has never mattered, and it’s really beneath us all to care about who gets it.
The first of these arguments seems to make little sense. It seems to be based around the fact that both Rage and McElderry are signed to Sony, perhaps the biggest corporate giant in music. In buying Rage, you’re still lining the pockets of the man. Furthermore, the Man is infact Simon Cowell (who I think is amazing - Ed), who of course owns Sony BMG.
No. He doesn’t. He owns the rather egotistically named SYCO, which is in turned owned by Sony, and makes no money at all from RATM sales. Infact, if the campaign to get them to number one succeeds, he stands to lose rather a lot: a visible backlash could lose him the further £3m he is reported to be asking for the next series of the X factor. You’re not lining his pockets by buying "Killing in the Name", and a simple click off your Facebook page onto Wikipedia could tell you that.
And yes, Rage are signed to Sony. But pointing this out seems to be a bit... well... pointless. Despite all the accusations that the campaign group is some sort of virtual anarchist commune, I can’t really see that any member is seriously envisioning that Rage being at number one is going to precipitate some sort of violent socialist coup.
This is because no single member really seems to care about the existence of the Machine – at least, not the economic one. The Machine they’re referring to is Cowell. And here’s where we contest the cynic’s second point, because what’s on our airwaves and television screens really does sort of matter. We live our lives amongst popular culture. The Christmas number 1, for the past decade, has nearly always been a novelty record, but the group isn’t protesting at that. What they’re angry about is that nearly everything is now a novelty record, that the charts are now full of talentless jingle singers with sob stories instead of genuinely exciting musicians, and that thanks to all that, children now assume that becoming famous needs no discernible talent or effort. You might hate the thuggish simplicity of Rage’s politics, but at least they’ve got some. Even if you hate them, listening to "Killing in the Name" is at least going to make you think about something. And if you happen to read anything about the band you’ll find out that they worked their way up and put in a hell of a lot of effort to achieve what they did. The effect of having more records like that at number one isn’t exactly undesirable.
As I write, another disparaging twitter on the campaign group pops up. “You guys are all sheep,” the cynic says. “You’re doing what they tell you, morons!!!” The comment seems ridiculous. Lying down and letting a Miley Cyrus cover, for crying out loud, with all of its connotations – take us into the next decade... well, now that’s sheepish behaviour.
Friday 30 July 2010
