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.
