Today Nico wrote a good piece on this here blog about the campaign to get Cage Against The Machine to beat X-Factor to the Christmas no. 1 slot. Read on the Counterfire website about how buying this single will send a Xmas message to the Con-Dem government, and raise money for Crisis, Disability Alliance, FalseEconomy and Women’s Health Matters.
Tag Archives: christmas number 1
Christmas No.1: Cage Against the Machine?
John Cage was an avant-garde composer from the US who believed that every type of music, from classical to blues to pop, was of equal worth. In 1952 Cage wrote 4’33†and revelled in the controversy it created. His most famous orchestral piece, 4’33â€, is a three-movement composition consisting of 273 seconds of silence.
John Cage
Fuck Cowell, we won’t do what you tell us!
I ‘ve got a problem (one of many you may say, but let’s focus here). I am, I have come to realise, something of a musical extremist. Basically, the purpose of my existence on the planet is to make radio programmes that traumatise and upset people who have conservatories and cappuccino machines and who laugh at A Question of Sport, and give some kind of hope to the beautful people who find all this stuff as ennervating as I do.
It’s a childish and ultimately futile aim, of course, but it is the only thing that stops me walking into the Stock Exchange with forty pounds of Semtex strapped about my torso, so it’ll have to do.
And sometimes it’s a lonely life, but not today.
For something has happened today that proves that there are 500,000 other like minded(ish) souls who have assaulted the bastions of banality and emerged victorious.
I speak of course of the people, heroes everyone of them, who have put a shouty records full of “fucks” and guitar noises that could strip a picket fence at 200 yards, into the Christmas number one slot.
Joe McElderry v Rage Against The Machine
I think we’re supposed to be taking sides for the current race for the prize of Christmas Number 1. Presumably if you prefer your pop music to not be a chicken-in-a-basket piece of mediocrity spooned-fed to us from the scraps of a four month TV talent show, then I guess you’re supposed to be hoping that the spoiling tactics of the Facebook-generated campaign to get Rage Against The Machine to top the charts this yuletide will succeed.
Personally, I couldn’t give a baboon’s red bum as to which of the two records hits the top, as this competition is flawed for several reasons. The primary one is that neither song is actually very good.
The viable alternative to a poor record ought to be a ruddy good one. If last year’s X Factor had any positive outcome it was that new people were introduced to the works of Jeff Buckley, as sales of his version of Leonard Cohen‘s Hallelujah rocketed as people gave a group meh at Alexandra Burke’s overblown rendition. If only a single person discovers the majesty of the Grace album that would not have done previously, then something wonderful has come from a televisual and musical pile of arse.
As a man now in his mid-30s, I am of the right age to have bought the Rage Against The Machine record the first time around. Or indeed have taped the album off of a mate at the very least. I did. The tape is still tucked up in a drawer at the top of my house, with the inlay card appropriately crafted with some sort of made-up teenage font to make it look boss. I thought it was great, and my teenage self pogoed at the indie discotheques countless times.