Rage Against The Machine Reaches Christmas No. 1

Posted on 20th Dec 09 by Paul Groome | 1

The final results are in.  Rage Against The Machine are the official Christmas UK Number One with Killing In The Name Of.   Simultaneously they’ve reached number 2 in the Irish Charts.  And that’s not all!  They’ve grabbed the record for the first ever Christmas Number One available for purchase through download only.  Not bad for a project that started on Facebook a few weeks ago, eh?

RATM

The winner of Simon Cowells X Factor has held the Christmas Number One slot for the past 4 years.  This repetitiveness was beginning to form a foregone conclusion in peoples minds: X Factor equals Christmas Number One.  Perhaps, it was the public growing weary of spiralling complaceny in music.  Perhaps, it was the quality of these tunes that was becoming a drag.  Or perhaps, Simon Cowell just needed to be reminded that he’s not the be all and end all of the music industry.  This Facebook campaign grew rapidly over the past few weeks and despite Cowells attempt to gain more sales by drastically reducing the cost of Joe McElderrys song, The Climb, Rage Against The Machine beat this years X Factor winner by 50,000 sales.

Zack de la Rocha, Tom Morello, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk have recognised their Number One success by announcing that they would play a free concert.  Any monetary gain produced as a result of Killing In  The Name Of will be passed on to Shelter, the homelessness charity.

To all of the Drop-d readers who spent their cash on a song that they, more likely than not, already had in their music collection:  well done.  This has reinforced the point that music still can effect a diverse group of people in a positive way.  The fact that this demanded a Rage Against The Machine song to number one in the charts in very impressive.  But it’s not the most notable point.  Just when it seemed that there was no activism and revolution left in music, enough people exacted a change to something they weren’t happy with, and that is the most powerful thing to have happened here.  And…we get to piss off Simon Cowell aswell.  Heh.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Tags: facebook, killing in the name of, Rage Against The Machine, Shelter, simon cowell, x factor