Every year for the previous four years, the #1 single in Britain during the week of Christmas has been whoever won Simon Cowell’s “X Factor.” I guess Christmas number one is a big deal over there, because fans of music that doesn’t suck organized a Facebook campaign to make Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 anthem “Killing in the Name” the top single in the country — and it worked. “X Factor” winner Joe McElderry sold 450,000 downloads of whatever crap he made, while Rage sold 500K.
Guitarist Tom Morello confirmed that the band will play a free show in the UK to celebrate the win, and talked about the nature of the campaign in an interview with NME:
“We were followers in this campaign, we tried to lend some wind to its sails, but it began at a completely grassroots level without the band’s involvement,” he explained. “Once we got in, we got in all the way, in those last four hours of the campaign I sent about 50 of the most storm the barricade Twitters that a man could send to try and encourage one last push.
YEAH! REVOLUTIONARY TWEETS! FREEING THE MINDS OF SHEEPLE IN 140 CHARACTERS OR LESS!
“Make no mistake about it, this was a political act! This was an entire nation delivering a stinging slap of rejection to the whole notion of pre-fabricated pop ruling the charts.”
I dunno, man. Rage Against the Machine used to be all about freeing Tibet with its militant revolutionary spirit. Now they’re logging on to Facebook to get more downloads than a teenager whose last name sounds like Dingleberry. Things were just a little more badass and scary in the ’90s. Rich people died of AIDS back then.
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yeah yeah, they sold out blah blah… but if you don’t get a boner or the urge to strangle the person next to you when you hear killing in the name, then you just have no soul
AND NOW YA DO WHAT THEY TOLD YA
Tom Morello may still rock, but he can totally go fuck himself.
/rolling down Rodeo with a shotgun
So, are we NOT letting the bodies hit the floor?
Their tracks are the bomb. Or is it a bombtrack? I’m out of touch with my mid-90′s self.
FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME
I feel compelled to add that if you’ve never listened to the album Renegades, you need to go get it with a quickness.
[en.wikipedia.org]
“Maggie’s Farm” has never been so fucking hardcore. And with all due respect to Cypress Hill, “How I Could Just Kill a Man” now belongs to Rage.
I agree about Renegades, Matt, however: “Make no mistake about it, this was a political act!”?
/Dismissive wanking motion
It dawned on me recently that all the teenagers who bought Rage albums in the 90s because we liked lyrics like “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” have grown up into the exact kind of Machine (college, jobs, family, suburbs) that the band was Raging Against.
Revolution fail.
I would like to point out that a few years ago the #1 selling track in the UK for a few weeks was that Crazy Frog-Axel F mashup Ringtone.
A. Ringtone.
That was a political message. The Brits are goddamn stupid and need to be ruled by royalty so this doesn’t happen again.
Deck the halls with the illusion of anti-consumerism just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
seriously though… i support them because they beat out a miley cyrus cover… FUCK TWEENS, FUCK GRANDMAS, AND FUCK LONELY CAT WOMEN… i am sick of them dominating the radio… now i’m gonna go burn my jock strap and have a toaster strudel
@ I am Dan
Valid. But that song did lead to one of the most awkward and hilarious videos in history:
[www.youtube.com]
Take the good with the bad, son.
renegade in general is a badass word, Matt, you ever meet something stupid named a renegade? I think not.
Am I the only one who thinks the entire career of Rage is just a sham designed to make money off a specific market? They seem like the Hot Topic of music to me.
Superfrankie: just because morons like it, doesn’t make the original intent any less valid.
Take a good political message, well put together and presented, and give it to a public that has no frame of reference for the kind of anger it’s displaying. I swear to god, when rage was first coming around, I heard people talking about “yeah, I mean, he’s totally talking about my teachers” at least once a month. And people wonder why Columbine happened.
Side note: this should have been Tool. Ticks and Leeches. [www.youtube.com] ftw. “is this what you wanted, is this what you had in mind? is this what you wanted, cause this is what you’re getting. I hope you choke on it.” THAT is a political message about mainstream music.
SuperFrankieLampard:
Maybe now, a little. But when they came out there was no one who sounded like them so it’s not like they knew they would make it big. Now Audioslave? That was totally a market decision. They’ll probably do a double bill tour with Cornell and Zack in 5 years.
audioslave is an acoustic abortion. Chris Cornell needs to be sat down and told that aimless yelling is not music. Also: a songwriting class. “be yourself it’s all that you can do” WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!?
To be fair, Cornell did write “Big Dumb Sex.”
“I-I-I know what to do/I’m gonna fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck you, fuck you.”
That boy’s a Shakespeare!
RaAgThMaFlaWa?
@SuperFrankieLampard: I always sort of felt that way, but I think it had to do more with how the band was packaged and branded rather than themselves or their specific message.
What’s the female equivalent of a dismissive wanking motion?
@Rebecca: I thought of eight or nine different responses to that, and all of them were sexist. So, uh, no. There is not a female equivalent. Unless you can mime shopping for shoes.
The female equivalent of the dismissive wanking motion is calling your mother.