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Britain's Great Christmas Chart Warsby George Ziemann -- December 23, 2009 Britain's No. 1 selling Christmas single has been declared to be a song by Rage Against the Machine, capturing the prestigious holiday chart position held just a few short years ago by Bob the Builder. I'm getting most of my information from The Guardian, which is among those making a huge deal over this. Of course, I'm still a little confused, but here's what I can figure out. This appears to be a seven-day sales battle. Rage Against the Machine (aka RATM) won, selling a half million copies of their single, "Killing in the Name," which we'll come back to in a moment. Their competition was Joe McElderry, the most recent winner of X Factor, the U.K.'s answer to (or the model for) American Idol. Both shows belong to Sony and Simon Cowell, and the Brits (and Scots and Irish and Welsh and probably the people on the Isle of Man) are getting just as sick of him as we are. I saw a list of the previous winners of this annual event over the past 10 years (in the U.S. we stopped having singles about the time this decade started). The first entry was Bob the Builder, followed the next year by Nicole Kidman and somebody (Jude Law?) singing "Strangers in the Night," or some other Sinatra tune. After that, I didn't recognize anything, although I have read that Cowell has owned the winners for the last four years. Last year, there were two versions of Leonard Cohen's "Halleleujah" in competition for the sales spot. Cowell owned the rights to both of them. So this year, someone decided that Cowell wasn't going to win again, specifically, a guy named Jon Morter. From last week's Guardian:
RATM's Tommy Morello spoke to about the campaign, saying: "I think people are fed up of being spoon-fed some sugary ballad that sits on top of the charts. It's a little dose of anarchy." On December 17 we get a great Tommy Morello quote from a few days earlier, when Morello tells BBC6 Music, "I think people are fed up of being spoon-fed some sugary ballad that sits on top of the charts. It's a little dose of anarchy."
Which explains why Morter picked a song from 1992 that you probably wouldn't associate with Christmas. It was all about saying "Fuck You" to Simon Cowell, whose candidate was doing a cover of a Miley Cyrus tune. A half million people put their 79 pence in and joined him. Rage Against the Machine say they'll give their proceeds to charity. There's one other small issue, however. Sony owns Rage Against the Machine's 1992 debut album, which is logically where "Killing in the Name" must have appeared. I'm guessing this will limit how much of the purchase price actually makes it to the band to pass on to to charity. Not bitching at the band. Just saying... because Sony also owns everything from Simon Cowell's shows. So they had a double bonus last week and this makes five years in a row that they owned the Christmas week chart challenge. EMI must be thrilled. I think it's good to see anything successfully get in Cowell's way. He's become the arbiter of commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic, and it's a giant step backward. |
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