Yes the title is being slightly flippant. But so much has been written about this from quite impassioned points of view, I thought a step back might be useful, maybe even interesting.
This conflict consisted of 3 sides.
On one side, Simon Cowell, and everything that he stands for about homogenised music and coercive narrative driven so-called ‘reality TV’. He turns people, and art, into product, which he sells rather well, incidentally.
On the opposing side we find the #RATM4xmas collective, thousands and thousands of people who bought the Rage Against the Machine track, Killing in the Name, in order to protest the capitalisation of the music and entertainment industries. The song’s main message was ‘fuck you I won’t buy what you tell me’. People involved in this campaign also donated to Shelter.
And then, somewhere off to one side we find the tech-intelligentsia (tech, for the most part because the RATM campaign was fought largely online) who pointed out the irony that the RATM track was owned by SonyBMG, Cowell’s company, and that Killing in the Name’s anti capitalist lyric somewhat opposes rebellion-by-purchasing.
Cowell and the avatars of his narrative made their pleas, they spoke in the ’emotional dialogue to camera’ format that their viewers recognise and their detractors despise. And from the the angry opposing side bile spilled forth.
“[..] nobody’s buying The Climb in order to actually listen to it. They’re buying it out of sedated confusion, pushing a button they’ve been told will make them feel better. It’s the sound of the assisted suicide clinic, and it doesn’t deserve to be No 1 this Christmas.” Charlie Brooker – in The Guardian
This campaign wasn’t just against Cowell and what he has done to music and entertainment, it was against the people who subscribe to that entertainment too. Oh, not always with such malignancy, but almost always with a sense of pity for those deluded enough to buy into the Xfactor – as if they didn’t understand that it was a simple and constructed narrative, as manufactured reality isn’t a part of all of our lives, as if ‘quality’ was an empirical judgement.
The Xfactor the cultural equivalent of a Disney film, but with less kitsch value. It represents a collective dream, a wish upon a star – the wish to be Stars. It is also easy viewing for people with heavy lives and tired minds. Sure the Xfactor pretends to be real, but so does theatre, film, television drama, video games. Reality TV just pretends to be a different type of real, one that is potentially dangerous. To rival this constructed spectacle is necessary, to discount its cultural importance is ignorant. If you consider Xfactor to be a blight, look for the source of the illness, and not the symptoms.
Continue reading An Ethnographic Study of the Christmas Number One War of 2009
