Within the space of 10 minutes my morning radio channel was
haunted by two cover songs: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and John Lennon’s
“Imagine”. Not before this I saw everyone go crazy on social media about Disturb's cover Simon and Garfunkle's The Sound of Silence. These classic songs are so well-known they are almost the equivalent
of hymns in the history of popular music. They have been covered so many times
that there are even lists of the top 60 (!) “best ever” versions of these
songs. I write this in 2016, the year
saw the unexpected deaths of David Bowie and then Prince. Both these trailblazing
musicians were undeniable critical and commercial auteurs. They achieved the
elite distinction of being known for their creative integrity and yet could
also reach a wide range of people.
A large open field that needed cutting, regular cups of sweet tea, a scythe, a pair of shears, an old radio cassette player and the best company in the world provided the backdrop for my favourite song. I was born in July during Britain’s hottest summer since records began and, for that reason, I was brought up feeling a sense of belonging to the days when the sun shone brightest. I find it easy to see why the sun has constantly evoked a sense of spiritual awe in our species. Hundreds of thousands of years on and science, if anything, has humbled humans even more to the sun. We discovered that, contrary to what we had thought for so long, our planet revolves around the sun, making it the centre of a solar system where we live on one of several planets. Furthermore, it is the most significant source of our world’s energy, making it an all-powerful life-giver contained in a single sphere of omnipotence. Within our own intuitive sense of being the sun seems to symbolize a reliable constant. There is sureness in the sun rise and the sun set, and this is part of the idea taken by one of my all-time favourite songs, “Always the Sun” by The Stranglers.
A few days ago I wrote a purely self-indulgent article listing my 10 favourite songs. Nothing too progressive in the art I have to say, other than perhaps my idiosyncratic tastes in music, but it was an enjoyable exercise that paid me money. A received a comment on the said article from an interested reader, “No prizes for guessing who want for the Christmas number one then?” It puzzled me. All the songs I had listed had been out of the UK charts, if they had ever entered them, for many years. Not long before I wrote the article I received an invitation from a Facebook group, “Rage Against the Machine for Christmas Number One”. It seemed like a fairly innocuous and bizarre bit of wishful thinking, as the majority of these groups/causes are, but seeing as I have loved the work of Rage Against the Machine since I first heard them back in 1992 I joined and didn’t think much about it. The most interest I gave it was the thought that perhaps there was a new Rage Against the Machine single out I hadn’t heard yet. Then I just happened to glance at a headline in a tabloid paper – that will remain nameless – in my mum’s house. The story was about an apparent battle between Rage Against the Machine and the winner of X-Factor to get to number one. The very slow cogs in the populist side of my head started to turn.
The track, of course, is not a new single, but the first great hit of the band, “Killing in the Name of”. It is not exactly your typical Christmas hit, especially if we consider one of the lines in the song refers to the extremist Christian cult, the Ku Klux Klan. Rage Against the Machine have always stood out as one of the most staunch and popular protest rock groups in the last decade. The always seemed somewhat out of place in the early 1990s with their Che Guevara t-shirts, Anarchist Cookbooks and so on, all which were popular during the 1970s, but fast-forward to today and I guess it is all back in. Not since the days of the second generation punk band, Crass, of the early ‘80s can I recall a band being so overtly revolutionary and willing to tackle political issues. They really like to stick it to the man! However, of course, their popularity has meant that they have inevitably compromised and contradicted some of their socialist beliefs. I am not an especial fan of their politics anyway, seeing myself as a militant individualist, but I love their energy in the same way as I love the energy of the early punk rock movement.
I also love the concept of “the people” finally saying they have had enough of X Factor and replied with such a perfect track to express this opinion. It’s not that the show is especially awful, but for years now it seems to have finished the job the likes of Stock Aiken and Waterman started in the 1980s. For five unbroken years the UK has had an X Factor number one for Christmas. Before then it was little better. There haven’t been many good Christmas songs written since the 1950s. A gleaming exception being The Pogues’ “The Fairy Tale of New York”, but even that was denied the Christmas top spot by a cynical and synthetic cover of an Elvis song by The Pet Shop Boys. I recall back in 1998 listening to the charts and thinking that there really wasn’t anything special that had touched the top 10. I thought matters couldn’t get worse. I should have known better. As Bill Cosby used to say, “Never challenge worse!” A few years on and matters had certainly got worse as the battle for the number one Christmas spot was being fought over by several TV talent show and ex-TV talent show contestants. The airwaves and the shops were reverberating with the schmaltzy covers of familiar songs and mundane tick all the commercial boxes original numbers. It was like Rick Astley had set down the commandments for song writing and producing.
One thing that really got my goat, however, was the inevitability being pushed in the tabloid article about the battle between Rage Against the Machine and this other bloke. Bookies were giving odds against Rage Against the Machine’s supporters beating X Factor, as they felt that the Facebook campaign would be no match for the corporate advertising and marketing machine behind X Factor. This is quite sad, but it is reflective of our times. Personally I like the article written in the Guardian’s Music Blog. It gives a sense of balance, referencing a link describing RATM’s obvious political contradictions and describes why, from a democratic point of view, it would be very sweet to see the band get the top spot. Sadly it also speaks with a sense of pessimistic determinism that it would be unlikely for this happen. Another article from another disreputable tabloid cries out for another punk revolution. Now that would be sweet!
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