Music Banter

There was a point on Saturday when I actually thought it wasn’t going to happen. I thought that a million grannies were going to buy a copy of that X-factor song for each of their grandchildren, and that everyone who downloaded seven copies of Killing in the Name Of was going to be disqualified and count for nothing.

I started to do that little backpedal in my own head of ‘even if it doesn’t win, they’ll have made their point,’ but I knew this was just lying to myself. I said so on here- it was going to be gutting if they lost, pure and simple.

But they didn’t. Oh, simple joy of simple joys, they didn’t. And now Simon Cowell looks like an idiot, and all that money that Sony spent on pushing the musical equivalent of raw tripe down the throats of the music-buying public has been entirely wasted.

That’s the interesting thing- this is the first Download-only Christmas number one. But it won’t be the last. In some strange way, you can see this as another part of the death throes of the old order. In the same way that a band like, say, the Arctic Monkeys, masterminded their meteoric rise through as crude a tool as Myspace, this is the sign that record companies just can’t BUY success any more, that unpredictable things crop up and succeed, and that the old tried and tested techniques for manufacturing success aren’t enough.

The media is dispersed enough that no-one is in control. Not really. That means good news for musicians, good news for fans, maybe not quite so good news for the people who are accustomed to making huge amounts of money from these two groups. That’s fine by me, honest it is.

You see, there’s always been music. There hasn’t always been a music industry.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Oh, there’ll always be infrastructure, and investment, and networking and promotion, of course there will. It’s just in the hands of the people now, which is what Tracy and Jon Morter realised.

There’s a lot of opportunity out there. If you’re a musician, you don’t need to do what they tell ya. You can just do it yourself.

I don’t buy much music these days. I listen to things online, I use Last.fm. and spotify, I listen to the radio and I swap mix-tapes with my mates, sometimes of music we’ve made ourselves. I don’t think I’m that unusual, either, amongst music fans. It’s just not necessary to buy music, any more. Maybe it’s just aging- I’m just the other side of thirty, and therefore on the slippery helter-skelter road to oblivion and irrelevance. Soon I’ll be at the final destination, sitting around amongst my CD collection and muttering about how pop music is just noise, and insisting that no-one knows how to write proper tunes since GodSpeed You Black Emperor! broke up. I can feel it starting to happen, too, that slow slide into the aged certainty that

I did buy some music this week. I hope you did too.

You see, this week, people decided that they were going to do something rebellious, something a little bit childish, and very funny indeed. They were motivated by a number of reasons, mainly a dissatisfaction at the seemingly endless string of bland karaoke nonsense that the TV show, ‘The X Factor’, was foisting on the British record-buying public at the Christmas number one.

It’s been one of those David versus Goliath stories- one one side is a husband-and-wife team with no resources whatsoever, who merely started a group on Facebook, suggesting that everyone buy Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name Of’ in the week of the 11th to the 19th of December, thus getting the 1992 hit to Christmas number one. The refrain from the end of the song, in case you didn’t know, is the repeated ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ which makes it the perfect rebel anthem.

No-one put any money into the marketting of this campaign, no-one put out huge ads everywhere, it just spread through word of mouth. It’s a totally do-it-yourself effort.

On the other side, is Joe McElderry, the winner of a TV show which ran on prime time TV for several months, and whose face has been plastered across billboards, advertising displays, and websites at great expense by Sony.

At the time of writing, I don’t know who won. What I DO know is that last night when I bought the song from Amazon, different versions of it were number one, number three AND number twenty on the list.

If it doesn’t get to number one, I’ll be disappointed. I’ll feel a bit like Simon Cowell, a man who I view as something roughly equivalent to Satan Himself in musical terms, has won.

What I do know, however, is that this has been something of an embarrassing week for Simon Cowell and the people he represents. If you spend all that money and get a serious challenge from a bunch of people who hate your music, is it really worth it in the end?

For Simon Cowell, and Sony music, the answer is probably yes. At the end of the day, they’re in business. If they make money, it’s a good thing for them.

That said, it’s nice to know that people can still really annoy the powers that be. It’s nice to think that rock and roll hasn’t lost its ability to be annoying, teenage, truculent and disobedient.

Fingers crossed.

For a long time now, an evil force has held sway over the music of the nation. A sneering, cynical enemy of all that is right and good, all that is original and heartfelt. You know who I mean. I mean X Factor. Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh, all those other fetid shitbags who are responsible for churning out one god-awful, forgettable chart hit after another, all in the name of making themselves more and more obscenely rich. They’re manipulative, they’re unpleasant, they play on the desperate and pathetic desire that people have for fame, and a regular basis they churn out awful, awful music. Bland elevator-worthy nonsense which would stand no chance of success, and rightly so, unless it was allied to what is in effect the world’s biggest pop marketing campaign.

Theirs is a world where mediocrity, consensus and the safe option of what has worked before is all that matters, where individuals are disposable cogs, made to compete with each other, to humiliate themselves onstage and be subjected to withering criticisms and increasingly desperate acts in search of their brief, pointless moment of success, climbing over the bodies of their friends and fellow musicians to reach the top. Their time there will be fleeting, a brief flicker of success which will gain them next to nothing, but which will have already made obscene amounts of money for their watching overlords. They don’t care about sustained success for these people- one hit and that’s it. Suck them dry and on to the next one.

All the while, those who have masterminded these poor individuals’ brief rise sit in judgement, and grow ever wealthier. Their smugness is impossible to conceal. And to be honest, they SHOULD be smug, considering their achievement; they’ve somehow managed to turn their sordid trawling through the nation’s musical mediocrities into entertainment. Before this was done behind closed doors, and the cost of finding the next young sacrificial virgin to go on their altar of disposable mediocrity was born by these grimacing svengalis themselves. Then, at some point, they managed a wonderful trick; they got TV to pay for it. More than that, they got paid themselves just for being there. Genius! The moment when they came up with this idea, and said, ‘hey, let’s turn the one thing which we actually have to DO and pay for into entertainment’ must have been a bit like those moments in films where the villain reveals his master plan and cackles diabolically for hours.

It was the moment when manufactured, mediocre pop turned from a giant beast squatting upon the struggling, desperate coma victim that is the music industry, and extended their tendrils into television, creating the world’s biggest marketing con. Evil genius. Inexorable. Unstoppable.

NO MORE.

FUCK YOU, SIMON COWELL. I WON’T BUY WHAT YOU SELL ME.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NUMBER ONE.