Christmas music, for the most part, tends to be both non-offensive and fairly generic-
two things you can’t really say about the song, Killing in the Name by Rage Against
the Machine, which somehow managed to become the 2009 UK Christmas #1 thanks to the efforts
of a couple who was really annoyed with the coveted spot being dominated by whoever won
the UK X Factor in a given year.
Since 2004 (when the X Factor first aired in the UK), it has been extremely common for
the winner's debut song to become that year's Christmas number one single thanks to a combination
of timing of its release, almost ubiquitous coverage by traditional media and the popularity
of the show.
The X Factor didn’t really start this trend; the UK Christmas time singles' chart tends
to be dominated by reality TV contestants and has been since around 2002, when contestants
from Popstars: The Rivals scored the number one spot that year.
Nevertheless, the X Factor has contributed to the trend significantly, with winners of
the show boasting an impressive eight Christmas number ones between them in the last decade.
In 2008, in an effort to stop the show from getting the number one spot for the fourth
year in a row (in 2004, the top spot went to the 20th anniversary version of Do They
Know It’s Christmas), a frustrated husband and wife team comprised of Jon and Tracey
Morter started a Facebook campaign to get Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up to
number one as a nod to the popular internet meme of Rickrolling, where people are tricked
into watching the video for the 1987 hit.
While the campaign did gain some traction, managing to get the song back into the charts
21 years after its initial release, eventually peaking at number 73, it ultimately failed
and the number one spot, unsurprisingly, went to that year’s X Factor winner.
The success of the campaign inspired the couple to try again the following year, this time
banking on the Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 hit Killing in the Name.
The band's anti-establishment mantra and the song’s theme of not doing what you’re
told made it a perfect fit for what the couple were trying to accomplish.
They also noted that they thought it would be “funny” to see a song like Killing
in the Name reach the Christmas singles top spot.
And it worked- over a million people ended up liking the Facebook page resulting in the
story being widely covered by the media.
The campaign was also supported by numerous well-known artists including Dave Grohl, Prodigy,
Muse and even Paul McCartney, who stated, "...it's out of left-field you know.
Everyone expects Joe [McElderry] to do it, and he certainly will sell a lot of records.
And if he gets to Number One, good luck to him.
But it would be kind of funny if a band like Rage Against The Machine got it, because it
would prove a point".
It should be noted that Paul McCartney said this several days after appearing on the X
Factor.
One person who was decidedly less amused, at least publicly, was X Factor host Simon
Cowell who openly referred to the campaign as “stupid”, among other choice insults
in the tabloids.
Of course, privately he sung a different tune, reaching out to Jon and Tracey to congratulate
them on the campaign and, according to Jon, he "was very nice, really nice to talk to.
We had a little chat about music and just things in general really.
He was lovely and he wished us well and he also said it was probably the best Christmas
number one race that he has been involved with.
He thanked us for bringing the race back a little bit and making it exciting."
As for the band themselves, lead guitarist Tom Morello was vocally supportive of the
campaign from the beginning and the band pledged to donate all the proceeds they made from
the sale of the song that Christmas to a charity for the homeless called Shelter.
The band also thanked fans for their support in 2010 by playing a free gig in London.
Of course, the campaign to get the song to number one wasn’t without controversy.
For starters, the song’s lyrics, which contain the word “f*ck” about seventeen times,
depending on the version you’re listening to, were deemed unsuitable for radio.
This came to a head when the band was invited to play a live version of the song on BBC
Radio 5live and they were specifically requested to not say the line “f*ck you, I won’t
do what you tell me.”
This request went over about as well as you'd expect, with lead singer, Zack de la Rocha,
screaming the offending line four times during the song before being pulled off air.
(Later, the BBC would issue a public apology.)
Morello also opened the song by loudly complaining about the X Factor and criticising the show
for trying to monopolize the charts and spoonfeeding people “schmaltzy ballads”.
Another delicious irony about the whole thing was that the band themselves were signed with
a label owned by Sony BMI, which also owned the label X Factor winners signed with, meaning
ultimately, the same massive company that was the source of the initial outrage just
made more money than they normally would have thanks to the promotion and competition driving
up sales.
The band defended this similarly to how they've always defended the fact that they're preaching
an anti-establishment message while being signed with a subsidiary of one of the largest
corporations in the world- they stated that it wasn’t about money, but sending a message
to the widest audience possible, and, in this case, adding that they would be donating all
their royalties to charity so weren't profiting from this particular campaign.
In the end, the song did make it to the number one spot with a little over half a million
downloads purchased, beating out Joe McElderry's The Climb by about 50,000 copies sold.
As for McElderry, he wasn't upset about any of it.
"This time last year I never thought for one minute that I'd win The X Factor, never mind
about having a debut single out, so I'm just delighted to be in the charts."
Bonus Fact: Ever wonder how the phenomenon of Rick Rolling
got started?
Well, wonder no more.
This actually came about thanks to duckrolling.
Duckrolling got its start indirectly thanks to the founder of the occasionally infamous
internet message board 4chan, Christopher Poole- better known online by his moniker
"moot".
Not long before Rickrolling became the internet’s go-to prank, moot decided to make it so that
anytime a user wrote the word “egg” on the site, it would autocorrect to “duck”.
The prank was a big hit with 4chan users who were particularly amused that the word eggroll
would automatically be stylised as duckroll whenever it was typed.
As the joke evolved, some time in late 2006 one anonymous user Photoshopped and linked
to an image of a duck with wheels- a literal interpretation of the word duckroll.
It soon became a common prank on the site to trick fellow users into clicking links
that led to the image of the duck, resulting in the coining of the term "duckrolled" to
describe the act of being duped in this way.
This all brings us to Rickrolling.
Some time in May of 2007 an unknown user on 4chan's /v/ video game board posted a link
purported to be for the trailer for the game Grand Theft Auto IV, but in reality took people
to a freebooted upload of the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up.
Google caches and a bit of trolling through the Wayback Machine reveals that this video,
along with being the first known video created expressly to Rickroll internet denizens, is
one of the earliest known examples of that music video being uploaded to YouTube.
It's also worthy of note that the uploading of this video predates an authorized upload
by some two years.
In any event, when linking Astley’s hit song became the new en vogue prank, the term
Rickrolling, borrowing from Astley's first name and the aforementioned duckrolling meme,
was coined to describe it.
Arguably the apex of the Rickolling phenomenon came on April 1st of 2008 when YouTube automatically
redirected every person who clicked on a video on the site’s main page to the music video
for the song, which we guess is a lot better than directing them to an alternate version
of this joke going around at the time involving a couple of ladies and
a cup...