So, Rage Against The Machine for Christmas Number One – the battle is heating up. RATM have predictably stoked the fires with a controversial BBC Radio 5 appearance, during which they swore in the famous chorus to “Killing in the Name of”. Enter stage left: an enraged middle England clutching their Daily Mails aloft like the burning brands of the Gothic lynch mob, objecting that the “nice, young boy” (X Factor Joe) is being blocked from his unassailable right, to be Christmas Number One because he won the X Factor. Now, let’s be honest, the F Word is not exactly shocking these days and, while it maybe is not particularly desirable on a national radio breakfast show, it is not really the moral disaster of the decade. What is really going on is that people are missing the point. It’s not about RATM being at the top of the charts, or about some hate campaign against Joe McElderry and Simon Cowell: the push to get “Killing in the Name of” to number one is a backlash against another stodgy, Kareoke-lite song being Christmas Number One.
Cowell himself labelled the campaign as “stupid” and “cynical” (the irony of him branding the grassroots backing of a genuinely great song as cynical should not be left un-noted, especially when compared to the previous two years’ fare from his protegées). But perhaps he should be looking, not at the vitriol directed his way, but at this year’s song, “The Climb”, and at last year’s horrendous cover version of “Hallelujah”. Neither song is, in any way, a good piece of music. Ignore the fact that “Hallelujah”, the original, was a great piece of song writing, and what you are left with is two very ordinary singers, preying on a captive audience, who are compelled to buy the single out of a love for the X Factor, not the songs themselves. Leona Lewis had an unarguably captivating voice, but Joe McElderry sounds about as snore-inducing as he looks. Also, speaking of “cynical”, perhaps Cowell should wonder how much the boy’s choir boy looks will affect record sales.
It will be a great day for pop if RATM do win this chart battle. Not because a “rebel anthem” won the nation’s hearts, rather than Cowell’s conveyor belt smaltz, but instead because the record buying public gave itself a voice against the calculated stream of shit being pumped its way. RATM's political activity has perhaps drawn attention away from this fact, conjuring up images of teenagers with Che Guevara posters. The noughties has been a decade of inventive and interesting British pop, but it has also been the decade that reality TV undermined all the progress of bands such as Girls Aloud or Elbow by conning a gullible British public into believing that they needed to buy the next over-produced, bland offering from the school of Cowell. Perhaps, if RATM do win it might actually spark a return to days when songs like “Day Tripper”, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” were Christmas Number Ones rather than just another CD on the January trash pile.
