All entries for Saturday 19 December 2009

Christmas Number One Thoughts

It’s been happening for a few years now. Some reality TV show winner puts out a single right before Christmas, and then a bunch of people on the internet try, and eventually fail, to get another song to the number one spot instead. Most notable was last year, where to protest a cover of
Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah taking the top spot, the internet hoards tried to get a different cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah to number one instead.

But let us not forget that strange week a few months back where Web 2.0 and social media finally seemed to be growing some teeth. In the course of just a few days, members of Twitter both exposed a huge cover-up by oil giant Trafigura and alerted the world to the fact that Jan Moir was an unpleasant person. After that, everything went a little quiet, but now the impotent fury of the middle classes is once again manifesting itself, but this time on Facebook, a site that remains far more popular than Twitter solely on the basis that you can’t use Twitter to archive photos of your friends looking like tits for all eternity. Well, that and Farmville.

So with X Factor ready to churn out some more garbage, a Facebook group was formed with the intention of getting Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name to the top spot instead, primarily because it would be funny to have a song with the word ‘fuck’ in it as Christmas number one. Things snowball. And for the first time, it looks like this might actually work. I hope it does. But I just can’t bring myself to buy the track.

There’s a couple of things fishy about the whole enterprise – firstly, both the X-Factor track and Killing In The Name are on a Sony label, meaning the proceeds from both end up in the same corporate pockets. Secondly, Simon Cowell himself started talking about the campaign which gave it more media exposure than it could ever dream of, and the kick up the arse needed to give it a real shot at working. Of course, whatever you think of the man, he’s not a fool and he didn’t do this by accident. Instead he’s purposefully created what seems to be a genuine race for number one. It means people like me, that would otherwise have let the whole thing pass them by and ignored the charts this Christmas suddenly know more than we ever want to about X-Factor (someone called Joe is doing a cover of a Hannah Montana song) and it also pretty much guarantees, with the extra media attention, that even if Joe only makes it to number two, he’ll still have out-sold last years’ X-Factor winner by a fair chunk.

But essentially I just can’t bring myself to buy Killing In The Name as I don’t really like it much. It’s a song of its time with the lyrics and meaning co-opted in to being something else. It’s early 90s shouty teen anarchy and frankly we’ve moved on since then. It’s no longer particularly edgy to shout ‘fuck’ a lot. As a friend of mine opined, if people really wanted a subversive Christmas number one they should have started a campaign to get people buying Another Rock ‘n’ Roll Christmas With all that considered, I just don’t want to be buying a song I don’t like without really thinking about it simply because my friends think I should; that’s the logic that leads to X-Factor getting 19 million viewers.

I hope it does make it though. It would be a victory for music that at least has some passion and thought behind it, even if that thought is about twenty-years too old. Personally I’m backing another horse: there’s a far less popular campaign to get the wonderful Tim Minchin’s White Wine In The Sun in to the Top 20. It’s not going to make number one, but it’s a lovely, touching, amusing piano ballad about loving Christmas despite all the cheesiness and dodgy religious connotations. Buying it won’t piss-off Simon Cowell, but it’s a great song and y’know, is actually about Christmas. Which makes it good enough for my 79p.

Dean Love : 19 Dec 2009 17:54 |  Tags: Music |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem