Posts Tagged ‘joe mcelderry’

If any politician was going to pull off the greatest stunt of a generation, it really had to be Tony Blair. And, by committing all the proceeds from his memoirs (as well as the £4 million advance) to the Royal British Legion’s Battle Back challenge centre, a project that will provide state-of-the-art rehabilitation services for seriously injured troops returning from the frontline, he has done exactly that.

The book can now be read guilt free, knowing that the proceeds will not be lining Blair’s pockets but helping soldiers returning from the frontline. It’s got all the talkability that Mandelson’s book lacked, it’s released in a season when most politicians are on holiday and the only serious competition it has for the front pages are Kelly Brook celebrating naked month by dyeing herself orange and parading in a series of ever-skimpier frocks and Joe McElderry coming out of the closet in the hope that it’ll shift a few more units of his debut album. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe McElderry has lost out to Rage Against the Machine – it seems that a significant proportion of the British record-buying public really have turned on Simon Cowell and given him a festive slap under the miseltoe.

It’s an upset, but its significance lies in what the power of the Internet might achieve next. Motivational balladry versus an old, shouty agit pop record should cause a few smiles and quite a few more spluttering grannies in front of Top of the Pops on Christmas morning, but it won’t change the world. But the methods to get said agit pop record to number one could just help change the world.

Any number of ad agencies and PR companies say the understand the Internet and all its uses. This is little more than posturing; if we’ve learned anything from the net, it’s to expect the unexpected and that no-one can truly predict what uses people will put it to and what they can achieve if they put their minds to the task in hand.

If the Internet can be harnessed in a similar manner behind a cause like cutting CO2, behind the Climate Conference in Copenhagen or whatever comes next, then there is a chance that real changes can be made in 2010 and beyond without people running up huge carbon footprints going on a protest holiday. Playing with the charts is all very well, but the real business that social networking-savvy people need to address is the process of using this small victory to springboard significant changes on the world and fight the welter of greenwashing, disinformation and distrust.

Perhaps this is all a romantic dream – but if Rage Against the Machine’s trite but pleasing net-powered chart victory can be translated into actual societal change through like-minded people working together in the coming years, then it will have been worth it.

If PR firms, ad agencies and people eager to make a difference don’t get it together and work on making this happen, then the military industrial complexes will – they are, without doubt as I write this, working on ways of utilising the net for their own ends.

Trivial as the chart battle of Christmas 2009 may be, its knock on effect could be real, organised changes made via the power of the Internet. That’s my hope for 2010…

It’s been interesting to be following pre-Christmas sales on the internet for the last three or four days, for two reasons. One reason is personal – my book, The Fame Formula, has leapt up the Amazon sales chart by several thousand places in the last three days. The other reason is that I’ve been watching Rage Against the Machine’s 17 year old track, Killing in the Name Of, consistently outselling the X Factor winner’s song – an instantly forgettable motivational ballad from the Hannah Montana movie – thanks to the Facebook campaign set up by a couple bored with the ubiquity of Simon Cowell’s vision of music.

I have a theory that the two are connected, intellectually at the least. The Fame Formula is, under the surface, an antidote to fame, a prick in the bubble of modern celebrity. I am certain that the same sort of people who are downloading Killing in the Name Of are buying The Fame Formula simply because they are tired of prefabrication and relentless hype on a foundation of sand.

The Fame Formula examines the degredation of fame carefully and uses examples from history to expose the weak foundations that modern celebrity has been built on, where talent has been hoovered out leaving only a husk of toxic fame. The book celebrates the icons of the past who built, with the assistance of canny publicists, a lasting fame propogated by extraordinary talent; it also offers a view on how to achieve that today. It does not say the past is better – the aim of the book is (as it is with the Rage Against the Machine campaign) to offer alternatives for the future, using great moments from the past as a basis, a springboard.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people wanting to overturn the Cowell vision of pop were buying the book to stock up on ideas. At last there seems to be a consensus of opinion agreeing with George Santayana, who said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” There seems to be a hunger for using the past to positively influence the future, at least in popular culture. If this is the case – and I hope it is – I’d say (with a little bias, admittedly) that The Fame Formula is a good place to start looking for ideas to adapt from.

If Rage Against the Machine’s refrain, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”, is the sound of Christmas this year, I hope people take courage from it and use social media and networking in ever more creative cultural (and social and political) interventions in the coming years. And if my book can help it happen, all the better.

The suppression of information takes many guises, I’m beginning to realise. Many guises, but at the heart, the old ways of doing things still rule. Someone pulls strings and the neck of the bag tightens.

Take, for a start, Hillary’s Secret War, a book detailing the ways in which a rightwing think-tank’s output on the internet was allegedly suppressed by Hillary Clinton during the Clinton regime, which has just been brought to my attention. According to the author, a Richard Poe, Clinton protected her husband’s regime rigorously. “Hillary’s attack machine bullied,” he writes, “blackmailed, terrorized, and intimidated every serious investigator, from journalists to federal prosecutors and independent counsel, until they simply gave up. In many cases, Hillary’s operatives carried out these attacks openly and in full sight of major media. No one blew the whistle. No one cried foul. No one stopped her.”

Poe describes himself as part of ‘the New Underground’: “By the New Underground, I mean the growing network of dissident journalists on cable TV, talk radio, and the Internet. In the course of our labors, we stumble, now and then, upon what Patrick Henry might have called ‘painful truths’.”

The book came out in 2004, but – whether or not you subscribe to Poe’s political leanings – his description of the ways in which information is suppressed rings true enough. There are many ways of suppressing – and getting out – a story. Only this morning I was reading Guido Fawkes’ Twitter feed, which suggested that the MOD were attempting to suppress footage of troops in Afghanistan refusing to shake the hand of Gordon Brown – shortly afterwards, he wrote that a source had confirmed the existence of footage and he was trying to acquire it. This is the New Underground in action – although Poe ascribes it to a rightwing think-tank, it is much more a bipartisan group of journalists and bloggers who won’t let anything lie in the face of suppression.

What, then, of Copenhagen? The internet is fascinated with the ongoing situation around the Climate Change Conference and is awash with information and misinformation. The net coverage is an ongoing fight between painful truths and distractions. The leaking of the East Anglian stats has given all concerned a personal wire service to the onslaught of information in all its variant states of truthfulness.

What many fail to understand is that the format is usually the winner. However many gatekeepers Hillary Clinton is alleged to have set up for the web, however often the MOD try and hide the fact that the troops don’t like an unpopular leader, however much obfuscation, argument and endless counter-argument surrounds Climate Change, the internet – that most flexible of formats – will always win through.

You just have to look at the X Factor for proof. It’s not Joe McElderry who’s won the X Factor, it’s the format. It’s Simon Cowell, who owns the format. The only difference between the X Factor and the internet is that the TV talent show is the sort of Mogadon for the Nation that allows people to suppress news from Copenhagen, merely because you can bury anything on page 20 or in an article on the internet if you have enough articles about tearful contestants – who’ve been slugging it out in a glitterball for the past three months – surrounding the story.