What Does Rage Against The Machine’s Victory Mean for The Future of The X Factor?

Christmas 2009 saw the battle for the UK Christmas No 1 single become one of the most passionate and closely fought contests in recent years.

Since 2005, this title has fallen into the hands of who ever was lucky enough (depending on your perception of it) to win the most recent series of ITV’s The X Factor. Every year, Simon Cowell cunningly manages to schedule his guaranteed money-making scheme in time for Christmas and thus, since 2005, the Christmas single has become an inevitability, and not the thrilling uncertainty it once was.

However, Christmas 2009 saw that all change and I think it quite appropriate that as we approach the second decade of the 21st century, the battle was ultimately won using the means of the plethora of modern technology that is now seemingly right at our fingertips. The origin of the uprising came from the globally accessible social networking phenomenon, Facebook. Tracy Morter and her husband Jon, a couple from Essex, initialised a group willing the British public to purchase Rage Against The Machine’s 1992 single Killing In The Name Of in a bid to overthrow the dominance of Simon Cowell’s empire. Whilst they freely admit that it may have started off as a ’silly idea’, it managed to gather more than 1.5 million fans and many more people will surely have been made aware due to word of mouth and such like, not to mention the media coverage it received once it was realised that this optimistic upheaval could, in fact, be achievable.

The other main testament to modern technology is that of music downloads. Being originally released 17 years ago, one would struggle to find a copy of the Killing In The Name Of in any high street stores and subsequently, all of the 500,000 copies that were purchased were done so online. What is also interesting about this is that it is the first single ever to have achieved a number one spot solely from the use of downloads. Even with the advantage of being available digitally and in shops, X Factor winner Joe McElderry’s version of The Climb ultimately fell behind, although somewhat admirably ended up only 50,000 copies behind the victors. At this point, I feel it appropriate to add that this was never intended to specifically target Joe McElderry, nor indeed any of the other contestants, but rather the commercialised world of pop music itself and, for many people, Simon Cowell’s seemingly relentless attempt at making as much money as possible. For the latter, however, this didn’t quite work out seeing as Rage Against The Machine are tied to Sony BMG, the same record label as Joe McElderry – Merry Christmas Mr Cowell. For fans of rock music (and I am using the term rock in a very broad sense here), pop music is generally viewed as an unauthentic, manufactured process for the sole purpose of making money whereas rock is seen as a more emotive, artistic form of music. In terms of public consumption, rock music has, as a general rule, tended to fall behind pop music. Pop music tends not only to be appealing to a wider range of audience but the way in which it is marketed means that it will almost always come out on top. If any rock musicians advertise themselves in the same way that pop singers do when promoting a new album or single, they tend to lose their credibility and authenticity in the world of rock – as stated above, rock music should supposedly be performed from within and for the purpose of demonstrating one’s uniqueness rather than for financial gain. The fact that a track that is so far distanced from pop music has managed to take the top stop over the generic standardised competition, means that this triumph runs deeper for rock fans that merely trying to overthrow Simon Cowell.