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X Factor's Xmas War
Opinion: Campaign strives to cook Cowell's goose.
A glance at the oily cogs of the music industry means that we must hunker down and prepare for whatever weird and foul meat it will churn out of its mechanized anus and into our ears over the next twenty days. Some of it will be puzzling and impossible to comprehend, like Bob Dylan’s 2009 album Christmas in the Heart, or this year’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year by Scott Weiland.
Yet even these are far more preferable to the hellish avalanche that’s mounting on more commercial fronts. Yes, Joe McElderry’s face is appearing in magazines and on television again, which means he’s lit out on the promotional circuit for his newly-released Christmas album, Classic Christmas. Joe was on the wrong side of one of the only high points of 2009, in terms of music or anything else. A lot happened in the two-thousand-and-ninth year of the Common Era, and apart from Sunday, December 20, most of it was dark and generally unpleasant.
This was the day when, in a shock victory, Joe McElderry was beaten to the Christmas no.1 spot in the UK singles chart by Rage Against the Machine’s "Killing in the Name"— a huge and fantastic upset that was the end result of a stampeding, online snowball-effect movement that stomped and spat on Joe McElderry’s dreams, beating him by over fifty thousand sales.
This was a small, but vital, injury to the corporate weight of The X Factor, which had enjoyed a sovereign monopoly of the coveted Christmas no.1 position since the show’s second series in ’05, when Shayne Ward told us what his goal was.
So Joe most-likely suffered a rude shock when he surveyed the charts on December 20 — the day that the Christmas no.1 was announced — and discovered that he was no.2, behind a song from the year after he was born that meant nothing to him.
What lengths did his handlers and mentor Simon Cowell have to go to console him? Did they go too far and fill his young Geordie head with an untamed revenge fantasy that he’s now putting into action? Maybe so, because now Joe is back from the edge to make a lunge at what he had always assumed was his natural right, this time with a whole album of potential Christmas no.1s that has already gone gold, and a plan to release his version of "Last Christmas"on December 19. And once again there is a movement that could stop him.
This year, the dominant opposition that Joe McElderry and whoever wins The X Factor will have to face is ‘Nirvana for Christmas no.1’.
This crusade, to thrust the 1991 grunge anthem "Smells like Teen Spirit" to the top of the singles chart for Christmas, comes on the back of the previous campaigns at a slightly different stance, motivated as much by morals as resentment. It might never have shifted into gear at all if it weren’t for the attitude manifested by Simon Cowell in a name-clash with children’s music charity Rhythmix, suggesting that they get a lawyer and refusing to change the name of the show’s girlband of the same name.
That Cowell eventually recoiled from his position and renamed the group Little Mix in the face of a campaign by the charity and a groundswell of public outrage, has not done much to alter his brutal reputation in the eyes of the public. And it certainly hasn’t done much to appease Rhythmix and its supporters, who have been horrified at the apparent aggresiveness in Cowell’s interaction with a children’s charity.
Many of them have now united with the Nirvana Facebook campaign, which after just over seven weeks in existence stands at over 100,000 strong. It sounds impressive, and on most weeks of the year it would be. But not at Christmas.
A crude numbers crunch suggests that "Smells like Teen Spirit" will need to sell at least 400,000 copies to stand a healthy chance, with Matt Cardle topping the Singles chart with that number last year. "Killing in the Name" did it with over half a million sales, and by December 15 the Facebook group had 750,000 members, which means only about two-thirds of the group’s members actually participated in the campaign. Going by this logic, "Killing in the name" can currently only bank on about 65-70,000 sales — a figure that will swiftly be eclipsed by whoever wins The X Factor.
Despite the grim outlook, there’s solace to be taken from the fact that in the last three years there’s been a significant countermovement that, if hasn’t always been successful, then at least has posed a threat to an autocracy. There’ll be blood in the snow when the sun rises on Christmas Day no matter what the outcome, and if it belongs to the wrong people, then at least the cause they spilled it for was an honourable one.
By: Ian Colgan
