Music purists who despise the pre-packaged “X-Factor” (British version of “American Idol”) songs always hitting #1 on the charts are buying Rage Against the Machine’s incendiary “Killing in the Name” as a form of protest
I’ve been wondering WTF is going on with Killing in the Name – a track that introduced me to Rage Against the Machine, and which I still use to get the adrenaline flowing. It’s been showing up in Twitter trends for the last week or so, which is unusual for a 15-year old minor hit by a band that no longer even exists. I just figured that the protesters in Denmark were using it for their soundtrack – even though it’s aimed more at the LAPD police culture that got exposed in the wake of the Rodney King beating.
But it turns out that the story is a lot more complex than that. Check out this excellent post by blogger FreakyTrigger that explains it in-depth.
In a nutshell:
- It started with Alterna-punks hating on the type of syrupy (treacly?) disposable pop that gets rammed down our throats by these music contest shows
- To try to prevent the winner of “X-Factor” from dominating the charts, they’ve started buying multiple copies of RATM’s “Killing in the Name” – a song that is pretty much as anti-pop as you can get. A scream of pure fury against The Establishment. Perfect.
- RATM even launched into the heavy cussing chorus live on BBC5 and had to be censored
- Buying Killing in the Name online is actually somewhat convenient, because you can buy as many copies as you like electronically, and it only costs .69euro (99cents)
- But what this really boils down to is paying 99 cents to vote against something that millions of other people are voting for
FreakyTrigger sums it up thusly:
Plenty of people have pointed out that these are good times indeed for
Sony, who make money off both tracks. But it’s also a fascinating case
study for marketers, because it pits two of the big “social media
marketing†ideas of the late 00s up against one another. On the one
hand the crafted, immersive, interactive experience – on the other the
power of the flashmob and the viral. Who’s gonna win?
Is there a business model for media here? Probably somewhere – in some kind of controversy, if you give people a frictionless way to express their anger and resentment, and make the price barrier low enough, you could hit on something.
Check out MoveOn.org raising $1 million so far against Joe Lieberman, ever since he started threatening to filibuster any kind of decent health care reform.
