Ten days ago, American Idol judge Simon Cowell said “it’s stupid” when asked about a Facebook campaign aimed at getting Rage Against the Machine’s early 90’s track “Killing in the Name” to #1 on the UK pop charts.
You see, Cowell’s UK-based show X Factor has dominated the holiday pop charts in recent years thanks to tracks from the show’s winners. Now, a surely blushing Cowell has done a 180 after Rage’s decades-old single (thankfully) outsold X Factor winner Joe McElderry’s cover of Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb” 502,672 copies to 450,838, effectively ending the Factor‘s four-year streak.
According to Brand Republic, the normally blunt TV star changed his tune so to speak and personally phoned the Rage campaign creators Jon and Tracy Morter to offer them marketing jobs at his record company. “I am genuinely impressed by the campaign they have run,” Cowell tells the Mirror. “It has been a good campaign with no dirty tricks and without any funding. This is their first attempt at putting out a record and they got a Christmas number one, so they have not done badly at all. I wanted them to come and work for me. I was deadly serious but they haven’t taken me up on the offer.” Well, at least it shows that 90s nostalgia and social networking savvy goes a long way.
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