This year's comedy Xmas No. 1 contender: Silent song 4'33" A motley crew of musicians backed by a Facebook campaign are plotting to hijack the poor beleaguered Christmas number one with a four-minute recording of silence. Following last year's triumphant, internet-bolstered, telly-talent-compo-orthodoxy-upending ascendance of the gleefully inappropriate and profanity-sprinkled Killing …
My missus is a musician, and is into this kind of thing. On being told about 4:33 originally I asked the question. The point of 4:33 is the context of the performance, and each time it's performed it is utterly different. She then said the magic words: background noise.
The X-factor single won't sell any less, the customers are completely separate. Who knows? the X-factor single may sell even more since the fans might be annoyed at the annoyed-at-X-Factor brigade.
Mind you it's probably going to be the best work from Billy Brag and Pete Doherty ever!
In the absence of incidents like last year Simon's puppet masters think of all of us as one giant apathetic amorphous blob. They still think that last year was a one off so they just need to agitate their puppet a bit more to get back to business as usual.
If stuff like last year's X-factor happens more than once and becomes are recurring feature some of the concepts currently taught in management schools may have to be rethought. The concept of "cheap tripe with marketing always wins", the concept of "consumer will always buy something they can be made to associate with" and a few others.
The mere fact that the "consumer" actually can think and results of marketing campaigns are no longer predictable is enough to cause a "brown pants incident" in some circles.
By graphically demonstrating how small and insignificant his work (and indeed the industry) is.
The music industry projects itself as being a big deal. Most of the stuff pumped out isn't popular. As more and more people become disillusioned with it, you see them targeting younger and younger children whose critical faculties are less well developed. They end up promoting sex to pre-teens, which is quite revolting.
Every christmas, all the previous years' Christmas number ones get played, so getting a Christmas No 1 means regular annual royalty income for ever more. Joe McEldry's cover of Hannah Montanna's Climb probably won't ever get played again on radio, because it only reached No. 2 on the Christmas charts, and No 1 on the New Year chart which doesn't count.
The entire point of 4'33" is that it's impossible to stage a performance of it with real musicians present and achieve absolute silence; all the random environmental and human noises which occur within the time period /become/ that performance. The silence is not the important ingredient - it's the lack of silence!
So the imperfections of each copy of Blank Tape make it a unique limited-edition of 1!
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