Securing the Xmas number One

At last! 

In a world of mediocrity and apathy there is something to celebrate.  Somewhere out there, people have decided that they are sick and tired of being spoon fed the kind of substandard rubbish that dominates the airwaves and the media and they are rebelling.

The Xmas number one is not the formality that it normally is.  That coveted (and, these days, all too easy to reach) pinnacle of marketing achievement may not be occupied by the latest X Factor winner Joe McElderry because a few thousand people have had enough.  Download Rage Against the Machine’s track and you could keep the latest pop product off the top.  Let’s hope millions of people do it.

Louis Walsh says its not fair and that it removes the excitment (since when did a procession retain any excitment, there’s normally no opposition at all for the X Factor winner), Simon Cowell thinks that it’s insulting to X Factor viewers and voters (er…and so what?), Cheryl Cole says she’d be “gutted” if McElderry didn’t make it to number one.  All the more reason to download the Rage Against the Machine track then.  It’s a pity a few more people didn’t try and keep her last dirge off the top!

Is this the beginning of the great public fightback against the plethora of celebrity tinged garbage that pollutes the media every single day?  Probably not.  It’s unlikely that we’re going to see piles of Jordan’s books being ritually burned in Waterstones or that the offices of Hello magazine will be firebombed or even that anyone mentioning Girls Aloud will be instantly imprisoned.  But it’s a nice thought!

This isn’t about depriving some talent free little pop pixie of his shot at the number one spot.  This is about a back lash against standards as much as anything (and also about the unaccountable dominance of Simon Cowell in almost every sphere of showbiz).  It probably won’t work and the charts will probably be rigged so that the inevitable happens and the X Factor winner is top come next week but it’s a start.  Let’s hope that it’s much more than just a start.  Let’s hope that it’s the beginning of a snowball that careers downhill flattening all those unworthy and untalented before it.  A vain hope I know but what the hell, Xmas is supposed to be a time of hope isn’t it?  If it puts off just one tone deaf auditionee before next years round of X Factor then it’ll have done something good.

Apparently there is another song you could download to help keep McElderry off the top.  It’s a Muppet song!  Only problem is, if you type in music by muppets into a search engine you’ll just get the back catalogues of most of the groups on Radio One!