Pardon, rage against what did you say?
I REMEMBER the first time I heard Rage Against the Machine's Killing In The Name.
It was at a friend's house, sitting around a messy kitchen drinking vodka and smoking roll-ups, aged 16.
Even then, the song's repetitive explitive-laden fury sounded faintly ridiculous.
And I was a teenager then, when righteous fury was as much part of my life as drinking vodka and smoking roll-ups in the houses of friends whose parents were brave enough to go on holiday without them.
But there was no escaping the visceral power of that pounding guitar riff and the squealing-pig solo, which sounds to me as impressive as anything since Hendrix.
Tom Morello, the band's guitarist, is the man we have to thank for that.
But what was it about the machine that so enraged the band?
In between the shouting and the swearing, the lyric goes: "Those who died are justified for wearing the badge, they're the chosen whites."
Sorry, RAM, you've lost me.
According to the Wikipedia entry: "The song rages against the likelihood that some members of US police forces are/were members of the racist Ku Klux Klan."
Oh right. I don't doubt the band's political seriousness - they recently campaigned against Guantanamo Bay - but a protest song needs more than nonsensical lyrics and 17 uses of the F word to make a point about racism.
I think Killing In The Name is in the same category as The Gossip's Standing In The Way of Control, which is ostensibly a rail against opponents of gay rights. Not that you'd know that unless you'd been told.
I imagine the way these songs come about is that someone comes up with a mean riff and it needs an angry lyric that the kids can shout as they drench each other with beer in the moshpit - or at the house of some absent parents.
At the time of writing, Killing In The Name has a small hope of becoming Christmas number one as opposed to X Factor winner Joe McElderry's The Climb.
Morello says the support for the campaign shows British music fans have an appetite for an alternative to "some overblown, sugary ballad."
Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, or in the approach to Christmas, but I have no desire to wipe the smile of Joe McElderry's face. You don't often get to see someone whose dream has just come true, and when I caught the X Factor final it turned my heart to mush - so much so that I stayed up to watch The Susan Boyle story, despite the presence of Piers Morgan.
But then I remembered what I don't like about X Factor when I heard The Climb again. It was listening to the lyrics - clearly a bad habit - that did it.
The Climb is about how it's not winning that counts, but the struggle itself.
And this is so contrary to the ethos of the X Factor, in which we are told over and over how much winning means to each contestant.
If a failed X Factor singer released an inspiring song about how winning isn't everything, it might get my vote for Christmas number one - especially if it featured a guitar break by Tom Morello.
awolstenholme@ywng.co.uk
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Friday 25 May 2012
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