Rays of delight podcast

Monday, December 21, 2009

Rage against the Machine have reached number one. A nation rejoices.


It's good to see that in these commercialised times, people are remembering the true spirit of Christmas. There's something truly humbling & holy about 600,000 peole downloading a song they don't really like just to piss off a man they don't like. It's what the baby Jesus would have done.

Though I downloaded it too! Eff me I just did what they told me!

Part of me admires this tenacious, backs-to-the-wall, Blitz spirit effort to get RATM to number one. It was a triumph of good over evil, for sure. And I'm glad to have played my small part.

But wouldn't it be great if we could all club together to do something that wasn't totally fecking pointless? Shelter, the homeless charity, have made about £50,000 out of 600,000 downloads. If everyone had simply donated 29p to Shelter the world would be a better place today.

And I wouldn't have to hear that bloody song again, which was definitely NOT in my list of Great Songs of 1992. It brought a lot of long-haired moshers onto the dancefloor at the Limelite Club back then, and if the feckers didn't knock my pint over, they'd minesweep it as soon as my back was turned.

It's the Xmas musical equivalent of paying £70 to go to a premier league football match to shout abuse at the players, knowing that a fair whack of your £70 goes into their wageslip at the end of the week. And then in turn that gets spent on Bolivian ladyboys and useless racehorses. Dunno what Cowell spends his money on. He's probably going to buy his own Carribean nation, like St Lucia.

As far as Christmas songs go, I would like all DJs to play 'Rainy Night in Soho' by The Pogues instead of 'Fairytale of New York' and see how many people notice.

I'm astonished that it takes 600,000 sales to get the Xmas number one. I suppose that 29p downloads and one-click ordering make it such a painless process. I certainly wouldn't have gone traipsing down to Our Price to buy a 7" single of RATM at £1.99, pushing through a horde of whey-faced troglodytes to do so.

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