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Oh God is it that time of the year again |
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Story filed Monday, 07 December 2009 |
Regular Popjustice viewers will know how tiresome we find supposedly 'viral' campaigns of the 'get this song to Number One LOL' variety and one of this year's Christmas efforts is an attempt to get Rage Against The Machine's 'Killing In The Name' to Christmas Number One in order to 'show Simon Cowell a thing or two' or something.
From what we can gather the point is to divert money away from the 'machine' of The X Factor,
which propels its own acts (and other Sony artists) into the charts at
the end of every year. Which might be slightly more effective if Rage Against The Machine weren't signed to, er, a Sony label. Still, punk rock, right?
Well, apart from the whole 'give Sony loads more money as a result of Simon Cowell's actions' thing there's a deeper problem at the heart of all this, too. 'Killing In The Name' is being embraced here for its perceived subversiveness, but it was released almost two decades ago and the fact that it's being wheeled out again as an 'alternative' - that it needs to be wheeled out again as an alternative - is proof of how ineffective it must have been. It (in the sense that 'it' has here been interpreted as 'a revolution against the mainstream') failed. The mainstream won. And do you know what? When it comes to the Top 40, and hit singles, and the Christmas Number One, the mainstream always will win. The Top 40 is a popularity chart and the alternative to popular music is unpopular music which by definition isn't popular enough to get in the Top 40.
As a sidenote, how tragic that it's a two-decades-old song that has been chosen to front this campaign.
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