So apparently it’s a big deal in England to have the No. 1 single during Christmas week. And apparently for the last four years, the Christmas charts have been dominated by winners of X Factor, a Simon Cowell-produced pop-singing competition in the American Idol mold.
And apparently this year, someone got so disgusted with it that he started an Internet movement. So this year, Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” will be the U.K.’s No. 1 Christmas single.
Cool.
If I were to list bands by the amount they impacted my life, Rage would easily crack the top 5. I vividly remember the first time I heard their self-titled debut album, in my friend’s basement when I was in 7th grade, and spending the rest of the day figuring out the basslines while he tried his best to imitate Tom Morello’s erupting volcano of guitar posturing.
I don’t listen to them much anymore unless they come up on shuffle or something, at least partly because at some point I considered the various issues inherent in being socialist rock stars. Presumably the members of Rage Against the Machine made a lot of money off it, and though I suppose they would argue spreading their messages was for a greater good, I spent a lot of cash on their albums, concert tickets and paraphernalia.
That made it harder to take their shtick seriously.
Still, that shouldn’t take away from how funky and awesome their songs are. Hearing “Killing In the Name” played live in the video attached to the article linked above reminded me how powerful their music could be, and how stylish Zack De La Rocha’s lyrical flow is, and how they’re really the only band to ever master the rap-rock subgenre.
So good for them, and good for the Internet, and good for society at large. Morello says it’s a sign that “people in the U.K. are tired of being spoonfed one schmaltzy ballad after another; they want to take back their own charts.”
And so they were, and so they did.
It feels like a lot of great musical movements stem from backlash; there will always be trendsetters and outliers and good music beyond what’s dominating the charts, but at the same time, there will always be plenty of open-mouthed consumers happy to swallow up whatever record companies are spoonfeeding them.
Eventually, it gets so predictable and so overwhelmingly awful that someone or something comes along and shakes up the system, and then those same consumers wake up and beg to be spoonfed something else for a while. Then the record companies figure out what people are buying, and how to mass-produce it, so Nirvana and Pearl Jam beget Creed and Nickelback and eventually the whole cycle repeats itself.
Not necessarily a bad thing, just a thing.
I’m not so naive as to think one Internet stunt is going to topple the Simon Cowell empire, and that thanks to this incident record companies will suddenly start searching for and promoting cool and original music again, but it’s got to be at least a small step in the right direction.
Anyway, here’s Rage’s “No Shelter.” When this came out, I thought it was about the most rock and roll thing imaginable that a song on the Godzilla soundtrack could deem the movie “pure [expletive] filler.” Then I realized the makers of Godzilla and producers of its soundtrack probably didn’t care, and maybe even figured the line might help them sell a few more CDs.
Still a good song, though. Lyrics NSFW:
This Bob Klapisch column is entirely based on faulty premises. Check ’em out:
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Tedquarters 