Alternative Nation reports that during an an appearance on BBC, guitarist Tom Morello remembered the campaign launched back in 2009 via Facebook encouraging people to buy Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” in the week before Christmas to prevent “The X Factor” winner from scoring the Christmas No. 1 spot in the UK for the fifth year running.
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Tom said:
“That’s why it was so great – it was a manifestation of the idea of Rage Against the Machine, wholly independent of the band or the song. It had a tremendous amount of momentum before we ever got the email that something was happening.
“And then we got in at the end and made a little push but the celebration – it was so pure at the end. It was the most downloads of a song in the history of the UK.
“You know it was sweet because Simon Cowell was also on Sony – which Rage Against the Machine was on – so Sony did not return our calls or emails during the entire time.
“And they put zero physical copies of albums in stores during the week because they wanted us to lose. Our record company wanted us to lose because Simon Cowell was the cash cow.
“And just for pure people power – defeated X Factor, defeated sort of the corporate monolith that was sort of trying to suppress one of their own bands.
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“Every penny that we made from those 580,000 [units] that were sold that week we gave away to charity. The show itself, we promised that it was going to be a free show – absolutely free.
“We paid for every port-a-potty at that show. And it was just a completely pure celebration of like the goodness of mankind.”