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.
