Sabato 19 Dic 2009, 17:38

It’s Saturday, December 19th 2009. and well, here we are again. On the edge of discovering who will be the new UK Christmas No.1 single. After 4 years we are going to be confronted once more with the prospect of Simon Cowell having engineered his way to the Christmas top slot, by virtue of promoting a single from the winner of X-Factor.

Now the problem here, is that having been on screen for the last three months, the show’s winner has gathered a following which will always ensure increased sales of any product released for Christmas. Any other recordings made without the aid of a large national TV show like X-Factor has thus nary a snowball’s chance in hell of competing against any such release. When Top Of The Pops finished in 2006, it meant that any standard recordings released at the same time, had lost the largest outlet for promotion on national TV and thus the X-Factor output now had an unfair advantage. To the average music listener, it is nothing more than a cynical ploy by Cowell to maximise sales, but the problem is now that this has become such a regular occurrence, people have lost faith in the integrity of the chart process altogether.

Why also is the X-Factor limited to just ballad singers… why no soul singers… no singer-songwriters… no bands… or multi instrumentalists? Why should ballad singers get the nod against everyone else? Would it be because they are easily controlled by the Cowell machine… cash cows fed the right songs to maximise yield? The cynic within me says, “Oh yeah!”

This year, thanks to an orchestrated online campaign against the X-Factor single, which is promoting the 1992 hit, Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing In The Name”, there is more competition for the TV engineered effort of Mr Cowell. He, now obviously irked by having some genuine competition this year, recently declared the campaign against the X-Factor single to be “stupid”. However, I for one hope that his arrogant attitude, open contempt for and obvious denigration of people who are genuine music lovers not yet brainwashed by his glossy and slickly produced TV show, will be what leads to his downfall.

We are not sheep. We do not swallow the idea that a recording made from the X-Factor has any god given right to be a number one single, just because Cowell and his cohorts have decided thus. Let’s be honest here, his protégé’s are not making the grade solely by virtue of their talent, far from it. They are doing so on the back of a huge media machine, which does its best to promote the winner of the show while suppressing any efforts to criticise, or produce any significant competition. I would bet that most people would not be able to name ten other songs which are on release now and be any sort of competition for Cowell. The loss of Top Of The Pops has aided in the X-Factor’s success by the back door… and that is success by default… not by talent.

A fair playing field would expose the X-Factor from what it really is… a blatant money making enterprise for one Simon Cowell. He (and Sony who released both artists’ singles) will be the only real winner… if they are lucky, any X-Factor winners will be able to secure maybe one album with decent sales then be cast adrift to flounder and drown in the sea of mediocrity from whence the X-Factor plucked them, which usually happens within two years.

So, I am off to purchase another couple of downloads of the Rage Against The Machine track and stick two fingers up to Mr Cowell. No sheep here!

Keep music real folks!