The Christmas #1 Single is dead. I know I go on about this every year, but The Darkness’, Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) was a great tune (wretched title pun aside) that’s not only about Christmas (unlike 85% of the songs on Xmas compilation albums) but also has a direct lineage to the fun spirit of Merry Xmas Everybody and I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day. But it couldn’t even make it to the top spot (pipped at the post by that gloomy version of Mad World from Donnie Darko). And if that couldn’t do it, nothing can.

In recent years, the charts at Christmas have been dominated by the just released X Factor winners’ single. Last year, if you recall, it was a horrendous cover version of Jeff Buckley’s cover version of John Cale’s cover version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.  Add a key change and a choir, and suddenly the song is “Hallelujah, I’ve won a TV talent show” rather than whatever that lecherous old rake laughing Len was on about. Being tied to a kitchen chair is just something that you do at Christmas, then. Nothing weird about that.

A campaign on Facebook and Twitter to get Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name to number one ahead of it was announced recently, and although this was quite clearly a jokey dig at The X Factor in general and musical nazi Simon Cowell in particular, a lot of people didn’t see the funny side. In fact there was a massive amount of pomposity on both sides of the fence. It’s a 17 year old rock track! RATM’s records are distributed by Sony! It’s not Christmassy! The appropriate reponses to these comments are so? so? and so?

My immediate thought was as long as they rerecord it with sleighbells and a children’s choir, they’re a  shoo in, although it’s unlikely that Zack de la Rocha, the angriest man in rock would cooperate. Tom Morello might have though. I reckon he’s a laugh. His squeaky windscreen guitar solos prove he has an appreciation for the ridiculous.

Rage’s self titled debut album is apparently mostly about imprisoned activist Leonard Peltier. I always though it was about monster riffs and shouting. I suspect most of their fans throughout the years have shrugged at the “politics” and just got off on the fact that they rocked like a bastard. Rather than Killing In The Name, Know Your Enemy is actually the key track from that record. It has everything you remember about Rage: the off kilter stop-start intro, the killer riff, the rather clumsy lyric “forward into ’92,/still in a room without a view!”, the scrap of proper old school metal vocal from Maynard James Keenan of Tool, and that bit at the end where de la Rocha screams “ALL OF WHICH ARE AMERICAN DREAMS!!” over and over again.

Unfortunately the lasting legacy of RATM is that they inspired that most oafish of musical genres, Nu Metal. I bet that made de la Rocha even angrier.

The band split, and three quarters of them formed the okay-ish Audioslave with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell. During this time Morello worked on the soundtrack to Dodgeball and appeared in Guitar Hero III. De la Rocha’s promised hip hop album never emerged, as he was obviously too angry to actually get it done. Eventually though, like every other band ever, Rage Against The Machine reformed for a comeback tour. Sell outs to the very machine they were raging against? Maybe. But if a bunch of Generation Xers want to go out and nostalgically punch the air to Renegades of Funk, why should anyone begrudge them that?

A campaign for Shelter, related the the RATM4Xmas Campaign has so far raised £30000, miraculous when you consider the self absorbtion of the average Twitter user, so without question the whole enterprise has at least done some good.

I finally decided to download Killing In The Name, as I realised that I’ve never legally owned it. I guess I owe those boys something. Maybe a Christmas number one would make Tom Morello smile (and make Zack de la Rocha furious), and that’s the least I can do for all the hours of fun I’ve had playing air guitar along to them in a thousand rock clubs. And if some kid hears it and realises there’s something beyond the impossibly narrow view of music that The X Factor presents, then so much for the better.

Merry Christmas I Won’t Do What You Tell Me!