Great post from Rayyan who I had the pleasure of teaching at Goldsmiths.
This time last week, who would have thought that a 17-year old rap metal cult classic which criticises the KKK and mentions the word ‘fuck’ 16 times would be propelled to the top of the Christmas charts by a Facebook campaign of a few hundred thousand people, ahead of a song produced by a TV show which had months of continuous media coverage and 19 million people tuning into its final?
Whilst politics has proven completely uninspiring of late, the campaign to get Rage to no.1 has captured the nation’s imagination. If the campaign pulls it off, it will have proven that people can use the new media to challenge the dominance of our stale, insipid culture.
The way the campaign grew organically from fans, with absolutely nothing to do with the band themselves, was nothing short of monumental.
As Zach de la Rocha, Rage frontman, said earlier this week on the BBC: if we can do this for something as unimportant as the Christmas chart, who’s to say what we can achieve in the big political issues of our time?
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Thanks for the mention Derek!
I will have serious gloating rights at work tomorrow, as someone in the office was criticising the campaign just the other day! New media and people power scored a massive symbolic victory today - plus over £60,000 was raised by the campaign for Shelter.
It would be great if we could do something like this for a proper political campaign - but in many ways, the music industry is intensely political as it is. Their labels might be owned by the same company but the fact that Rage won purely on downloads and by a margin of 50,000 will lead to a shake-up of the music industry. It might even be one step towards free music.
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