F*** you I won't do what you tell me! Unless it's buy this single.

[angelophile]

So, this year's Christmas number one is Rage Against the Machine with Killing in the Name Of. Thanks to a "grass roots" internet campaign to keep Simon Cowell's latest X-Factor act off the top spot.

Now, leaving aside the fact that Cowell and Sony Records are the big winners here, since both songs come from Sony (in fact, I half expect it to be revealed that one of the masterminds behind it is a Sony employee - "Double your sales in one go!"), I've heard this hailed as a victory for "people power".

"People power"? Who did they think were buying the X-Factor single for the last few years? Penguins?

Because, to me, the 19.1 million who tuned in to watch the final episode of this series of X-Factor is people power. The millions who rang up and voted for the winner, people power too. I don't see any real victory here for people power. There's the complaint about manufactured pop, but what was this campaign but manufactured? And what has it changed? The people who bought the single this week will be gone tomorrow.

What this has done is proven how utterly irrelevant the UK singles chart has become. That was pretty much a given already when all the chart shows, including Top of the Pops, cancelled after 42 years, were pulled from the schedules. But it pretty much sums it up when an obscure internet campaign on Facebook can shift enough copies to claim a Christmas number one. Adding to that is the fact that a show that got 19.1 million tuning in doesn't actually bring about enough sales to beat out an obscure internet campaign - people might be happy phoning in to make someone the next big pop star, but they're not actually buying the damn singles to support that - X-Factor is about TV and not music, and while that's a fair point to make, I don't think this campaign's made it as well as they thought. Why? Because to make the charts about the music, not the hype, people should have just been buying the song they liked most, not the one they were told to buy, either by the internet or TV.

Now we've just got stuck with another novelty Christmas number one which will be forgotten next year. And where's the victory there?

Comments

[angelophile.livejournal.com]

Topping the list of things I wished I'd said today is Kieron Gillen's comment: "The thing I don't understand is the argument from both sides that Killing... isn't a pop single. It's Come On Eileen for metalheads FFS".

[wardytron.livejournal.com]

But the actual experience of listening to Come On Eileen isn't anywhere near as horrible, is it. There are violins and things, rather than pneumatic drills and hoovers and a boy shouting at you.