Rage Against Dignity and Maturity

When I was but a hopelessly jaded, obstinate teenager I attended a very small, very liberal alternative school that was more than happy to give a top-notch education to every stripe of weird kid in the district. We had free-thinking hippies, neon-haired artistes, gay kids just tiptoeing out of the closet and, of course, angry junior anarchists who were determined to fight The Man no matter who or what that actually means. One afternoon just such a bedreadlocked ruffian was attempting to sway the opinions of a 16-year-old version of yours truly concerning the merits of the band Rage Against the Machine, which was still relevant at the time. In as eloquent a way as an adolescent malcontent like myself could manage, I said that I didn't really buy Rage's rebellious anti-authority message beyond its use as a gimmick to sell records to kids who don't know any better. Well, my opinions on the matter haven't really changed, but now the band seems to have popped out of its 90's style grave to fight The Man once again via the Internet. This time, The Man happens to be Simon Cowell.

As the movie Love Actually taught us angry Americans, the music business in the UK spends the better part of the holiday season obsessed with who will have the best-selling Christmas single in the country. As far as I can tell this consumer frenzy contest has no real input from the rest of the year's buying trends, as past winners have scored with the same song two years in a row or have come from unusual corners of the rock scene. But ever since Simon Cowell, the very effigy of Vague Evil Record Executives people have been content to burn for roughly a decade, got his fingers in the running, the UK Christmas single dash has been rather calculated. Crappy pop songs have won to the tune of hundreds of thousands of copies, further fueling the corporate music machine against which some people have the occasional urge to rage.

That's why some guy on the Internet decided to game the system this year by starting a multi-platform social networking campaign to get a bunch of people to buy Rage Against the Machine's nearly two decade old single "Killing in the Name" instead of whatever treacly sonic garbage Cowell was backing.

In principle I find this kind of hilarious, but I do so dearly wish the campaign had centered on any other band than Rage. Things were so nice for a little while. The band hadn't really been active, their fans had moved on, and most importantly Zack de la Rocha shut the hell up for a while. Now, as you can see in the above video, Rage is once again standing on an epic pile of sophomoric ideology from which they can lecture anyone who cares to listen about the evils of the world. They really stuck it to shameless commercialism this year by coming from behind and winning the UK Christmas single contest.

Never mind the fact that "Killing in the Name" comes off of the band's self-titled debut album owned by Epic Records, a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment, the very company that employs Simon Cowell and owns the rights to the intended #1, X-Factor winner Joe McElderry's cover of a Miley Cyrus song. Way to fight the system, Rage fans. I'm sure Cowell and his record exec buddies are feeling mighty bruised now that you unintentionally created a buying competition that roughly doubled the singles contest income at Sony and fostered a revival of one of their essentially defunct properties.

The only mitigating factor here is that Rage donated a portion of their proceeds to Shelter, a charity to fight homelessness. That's the big, ironic tangle of this whole thing. Rage Against the Machine ostensibly stands for freedom from corporate greed and political manipulation, but they distribute their message by relying on politically manipulative posturing shouted from a platform made possible by a shamelessly greedy corporation. Further, charities like Shelter wouldn't get massive donations like the roughly $120,000 of this year's "Killing in the Name" campaign without the queasy partnership of hypocrites like Rage Against the Machine and cynical curs like Simon Cowell. As far as I can tell, there's nothing more Christmas-y than that.