There is a gaping hole at the centre of pop music – or at least there will be if a new campaign gets its way.
Started, as ever, on social networking sites such as Facebook fans across Britain are trying to spoil The X Factor’s Christmas party. Going up against a poor, deluded soul from the talent show this year is a piece containing only silence. Written in the 1950s the seminal John Cage composition ‘4.33’ witnessed an audience paying good money to sit through four and a half minutes of complete silence – a stunt which could yet be visited on the nation.
Last year, of course, Rage Against The Machine stood toe to toe against Simon Cowell. Yet there is something about this new campaign which –although obtuse – feels yet more subtle, more cohesive and ultimately more poetic. The increasing vapidity of British pop music is highlighted by the ever toxic X Factor, a show which perversely attempts to showcase talent whilst desperately seeking moments of controversy to boost ratings. The X Factor is not about music but about headlines, ‘4.33’ perhaps contains more musical merit than the sweat from a team of overpriced, overpaid and overrated songwriters.
Furthermore, the whole notion of a campaign of silence springing up in 2010 just feels right. The growth of social networking – combined with the always present Blackberry – means that people are connected 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There is no way to turn off the stream of data pollution, as the endless flood of trending topics spirals into infinity. The information age pushes us away from each other, sitting in silence watching information on a screen. To have the nation sit in silence when the Christmas number one is announced is an extraordinary gesture, a symbol of the increasing lack of simple communication between ordinary people at one of the most tender and poignant moments of the year.
All too often in the current political climate, people feel like they are simply not being heard. Watching the news reports flood in from the student protests, you are struck by a sense of voiceless screaming. People who have been denied their basic right of representation, trodden on by politicians who seem endlessly fixated on preserving coalitions, building careers and not about the lives of those who gave them their job in the first place. The silent majority, disillusioned by mainstream politics, have long since given up on any sense of representation. The umbilical cord between Parliament and people was cut long ago, and with just a few days left until Christmas perhaps ‘4.33’ should come to represent an increasing sense of hysteria creeping across the nation.
Of course the Facebook campaign could mean none of those things. It could be a bit of fun – a stunt, a prank the sort of thing the office joker dreams up when not putting food colouring in the water cooler. It’s attention seeking of the worst sort, the kind that sees one young person pulled out of the grime of everyday life and sneers at their success. But still, something compels us to protest. The fakery, the Machiavellian string pulling – The X Factor is our lives writ large, a pulsating cancer on weekend television. Now let’s piss them off.
Words by Robin Murray
Find out more about Cage Against The Machine, including links to buy the release, at their website HERE.
