{"id":143,"date":"2009-12-21T20:53:03","date_gmt":"2009-12-21T20:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=143"},"modified":"2009-12-21T20:53:03","modified_gmt":"2009-12-21T20:53:03","slug":"number-1s-of-2009-20-december-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=143","title":{"rendered":"Number 1s of 2009: 20 December 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, now.\u00a0 If you’re British, you already know where this is heading.\u00a0 But for everyone else, let’s set the scene.<\/p>\n

It must have seemed so simple.\u00a0 The X Factor<\/em> would crown its 2009 winner on Sunday 13 December, release the single the next day (invariably a rousing ballad about how hard the winner had worked and what an incredible journey they had been on, and a hastily assembled clip-show video), and then soar to the top of the charts to be number 1 on Christmas day.\u00a0 It worked in 2005 with Shayne Ward<\/a>.\u00a0 It worked in 2006 with Leona Lewis<\/a>.\u00a0 It worked in 2007 with Leon Jackson<\/a>.\u00a0 And it worked in 2008 with Alexandra Burke<\/a>.\u00a0 Ratings were huge.\u00a0 No other record company was trying to compete.\u00a0 Bookmakers weren’t even wasting their time offering odds on the Christmas number 1, because it was such a foregone conclusion.\u00a0 They were only taking bets on who’d come second.<\/p>\n

What could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n

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Yes,\u00a0really. \u00a0“Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine<\/strong> reached number 25 on its original release in 1992, and was, to put it mildly, not an obvious contender for the 2009 Christmas number 1.\u00a0 Its unexpected appearance at the top of the charts is entirely due to a Facebook campaign expressly intended to stop Simon Cowell from getting his fifth consecutive Christmas Number One.\u00a0 This has been tried before.\u00a0 A groundswell of support last year saw Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah”<\/a> reach number two in competition to the Alexandra Burke cover, but it was never close to winning.\u00a0 Rage Against the Machine managed it with a 10% margin, selling half a million copies in a week.<\/p>\n

So, nobody really expected this to happen.\u00a0 When the midweek sales came out on Tuesday, and showed Rage ahead, people sat up and took notice – but at that point, X Factor<\/em> was briefly ahead on the digital sales.\u00a0 And besides, the singles chart counts from Sunday to Saturday; the RATM single had an extra day of sales, so it wasn’t too surprising to find it in the lead.\u00a0 What’s more, the X Factor<\/em> single didn’t come out on CD until Wednesday – and while CD singles aren’t a big deal for most releases these days, they do matter to X Factor<\/em> releases, which sell in large numbers to very occasional record buyers.\u00a0 When the CD single hit the shelves, the gap started to close rapidly.\u00a0\u00a0By the time RATM themselves started doing the media rounds, pledging to donate their royalties to charity and hold a free show if they won, things were getting interesting.\u00a0 RATM were still ahead with one day to go, but all logic said that the X Factor<\/em> single would overtake it at the last minute.\u00a0 And then… it didn’t.<\/p>\n

You may well ask what exactly this proves.\u00a0 After all, “Killing in the Name” was released by Sony – not just a major label, but the very same major label ultimately behind the X Factor <\/em>single.\u00a0 (Although claims that Simon Cowell personally stands to gain from its sales are apparently mistaken – it’s a different division.)\u00a0 As an act of mass consumerism, the campaign is hardly the stuff of revolution.\u00a0 Some people are claiming that it’s a victory for “real music”, whatever that means, but that’s a little silly; it’s at number one because of the campaign, not because half a million people suddenly woke up one week and decided they had a sudden urge to buy Rage Against The Machine’s seventeen-year-old debut single.<\/p>\n

No, to understand this, you need to understand the quaint British tradition of taking the Christmas Number One seriously.\u00a0 In the eighties and nineties, the race for the Christmas Number One was a big deal.\u00a0 The same held for the first half of this decade.\u00a0 And then the whole thing got hijacked by the X Factor<\/em>.\u00a0 I think that really pushed this campaign over the edge: not just the fact that X Factor<\/em> coronation singles are invariably syrupy mush, but their appropriation and destruction of a beloved (if utterly pointless) national institution.\u00a0 As much as anything else, this is about a big chunk of the British public putting its collective foot down and telling Simon Cowell that the Christmas Number 1 slot isn’t his personal property.<\/p>\n

In interviews this week, Simon Cowell has liked to point out that most Christmas Number 1s were terrible.\u00a0 He has a point.\u00a0 It hasn’t been about “real music” in years.\u00a0 Nor will it be next year.\u00a0 In 2004, it was the\u00a0lousy\u00a0Band Aid 20 charity single.\u00a0 In 2002, it was another reality TV release, the debut single from Girls Aloud.\u00a0 2001 was a novelty duet between Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman.\u00a0 2000 was Bob the Builder.\u00a0 1999 was Westlife.\u00a0 And before that, there was a similar stretch of dominance by the Spice Girls.\u00a0 1995 was “Earth Song.”\u00a0 1993 was Mr Blobby.\u00a0 1992 was “I Will Always Love You.”\u00a0 Go back to the eighties, and you get two Cliff Richard singles, two fifties throwbacks, and Renee & Renato<\/a>.\u00a0 The full list is here<\/a> – and yes, it’s mostly crap.<\/p>\n

But that’s not the point.\u00a0 When the British public think about the Christmas number one, they think fondly back to the days when it was a race.\u00a0 Sometimes something half-decent won, like boy band Easy 17’s “Stay Another Day” in 1994.<\/p>\n

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Or “2 Become 1”<\/a> in 1996, or even the occasional genuine classic like the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”\u00a0in 1981<\/a>.\u00a0 More often, it was something jawdroppingly awful, but that was part of the charm too.\u00a0 Here’s veteran MOR singer Cliff Richard with his 1988 Christmas number 1, “Mistletoe and Wine.”\u00a0 Look out for the cutting edge choreography in the last couple of minutes.<\/p>\n

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The point is, it’s about the contest, even if the contest is pointless.\u00a0 And that’s why people resent the X Factor<\/em> coronation singles in large enough quantities to pull off something like this.\u00a0 Nobody would care if it came out in February.<\/p>\n

Is the music irrelevant, then?\u00a0 Not entirely.\u00a0 The X Factor<\/em> winning single is always supposed to be the pay-off to the story that they’ve been telling on the screen, and it’s usually a cover version of a song that makes all the right points; “Killing in the Name” was chosen because its sheer inappropriateness, utter randomness, and vaguely unfocussed yelling was perfect for the story the other<\/em> side wanted to tell.\u00a0 In both cases, it’s not about what the song actually says, it’s about what it means (or is meant to mean) in context.\u00a0 It’s all very Phonogram<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You’ll note I haven’t said much about the X Factor<\/em> single itself.\u00a0 It’s by 18-year-old Joe McElderry, a sweet if bland kid who does have a decent voice, albeit one that seems more suited for musicals, and who has had the misfortune to get caught in the crossfire here.\u00a0 That said, he’s such an archetypal X Factor<\/em> contestant that it probably hasn’t helped.\u00a0 If somebody like runner-up Olly Murs had won – more of a personality, a bit less anonymous – I wonder whether it would have made a difference.\u00a0 In some gloriously misjudged interviews earlier in the week, Cowell and fellow judge Cheryl Cole accused campaigners of “bullying” McElderry.\u00a0 Coming from a show that deliberately invites bad singers back to be humiliated on national television before a mocking audience, they would be in no position to take the moral high ground on that one, even if it were true.<\/p>\n

McElderry’s single, in another questionable call by Cowell, is “The Climb”<\/a>, a cover of a Miley Cyrus song taken from the soundtrack to Hannah Montana: The Movie<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s a choice that practically embodies all that is safe, boring and corporate about the X Factor<\/em>;\u00a0despite furious endeavours on the part of her record company, Miley Cyrus has\u00a0not yet taken off as a mainstream star in Britain outside her original Disney audience, and\u00a0hitching McElderry to her, however remotely, was probably an error intself.\u00a0 It’s also, ironically, a song about the importance of trying your best and working hard, because it’s not the winning that counts, “it’s the climb.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chances are we’ll be coming back to “The Climb” next week, because X Factor<\/em> coronation singles tend to stay at the top for several weeks, while RATM is a one-week protest stunt.\u00a0 This has, in fact, happened before – back in the show’s first year, Steve Brookstein entered at number 2, though he had the excuse of competing with Band Aid 20.\u00a0 He climbed to number one the next week.\u00a0 McElderry will probably do the same.<\/p>\n

McElderry could also, with some justification, point out that RATM’s total probably contains a hell of a lot more duplicate purchases than his – and that with only 50,000 in it, RATM’s extra day of sales might conceivably have tipped the balance.\u00a0 In fact, his record sold as well as the other X Factor<\/em> winners.<\/p>\n

Wrapping up, we might as well note that Rage Against the Machine had a total of six UK top 40 hits during their original career.\u00a0 Until this week, their biggest hit was actually “Bulls on Parade”<\/a>, which made number 8 in 1996.\u00a0 Frankly, it’s not one of their better ones, so here’s the video for “Sleep Now In The Fire” instead.<\/p>\n

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And Simon Cowell can take comfort in this: he may not have the number one spot, but his show does still dominate the rest of the chart.\u00a0 Between them, X Factor<\/em> alumni and judges, and old songs charting on the strength of an X Factor<\/em> cover, take up 11 slots on this week’s chart.\u00a0 Throw in Susan Boyle and you get 12.\u00a0 And that’s before we even get on to songs by other artists which were promoted on the results show.\u00a0 But still, it’s not quite his world any more, this week.<\/p>\n

This week’s other new entries:<\/p>\n