Rage against who exactly?

The battle is on for Christmas number one. The gap is narrowing between the surprise entry Rage Against The Machine and X Factor winner Joe McElderry and everyone is having a lovely time talking about who will get it.
Let us look a bit deeper into how this all came about. So Simon Cowell, Syco Records and Sony have had a brilliant 4 years with the X Factor winners reaching Christmas number one year after year. Somebody, let’s say (as the papers do) an ordinary couple on Facebook, began a campaign to show that the British people would not stand for the likes of the manufactured karaoke of the X Factor any longer and that what people actually want to listen to over Christmas dinner is a song called 'Killing in the Name' which reached number 25 in the singles chart when it was released in 1992. I'm guessing that the choice of song wasn't given a huge amount of thought by the lowly Facebook couple and the idea of a song that they liked from a band called Rage Against The Machine would be a fairly good choice. Obviously the name of the band is pretty apt and the song of course is likely to appeal to the kind of audience who wouldn't exactly watch the X Factor or buy the winner's single so, in some ways it is a good choice, but I can't help but think that the whole thing is hugely manufactured and preying on the very people who are so strongly opposed to the Cowell machine. Is it just me who is a little confounded by how successful this movement has been? I'm not normally a cynical person but I think that strings are being pulled somewhere. I mean both artists are receiving such an enormous amount of publicity and yet has anyone actually noticed that both artists are signed to the same record label? What a happy coincidence for Sony.

Do the Rage followers know this? I would have thought if they were opposed to the idea of a man in a suit making an enormous amount of money from manufacturing the Christmas number one, then they would also not like the thought of a whole room full of men in suits drooling with glee over the prospect of two of their own artists battling for it. At the end of the day, into whose back pocket does the cash go? It's not the Californian rockers and it's certainly not the little geordie.


I'm sure Sony will be having a very merry Christmas.