Silence the charts

Remember how Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The name Of" suddenly became the Christmas number one in the UK last year, clearing the top spot from X Factor winners and such? Well, this year a similar endeavor is in the making, this time in order to get John Cage's famous 4'33" (4 minutes and 33 seconds of an orchestra staying practically silent) to reach number one. I think it's a wicked idea, especially because last year's campaign got critiqued for the suitability of a RATM song for such purposes.

John Cage

However, the decision to pick this particular "song" has created a few problems, too. On the CATM campaign blog [here] the person behind the campaign and its Facebook page [here] tells about The Royal British Legion planning on recording a piece of silence as well.

And to make things even more confusing, apparently it isn't the original John Cage piece people are encouraged to buy but a retake, recorded by a number of British artists, such as Suggs of Madness, Orbital, Pendulum and UNKLE [says BBC].

The retake was probably made to be able to donate all the campaign profit to various charities (including British Tinnitus Association *cough*) but since the CATM campaign wasn't originally meant to become this huge, nobody seems to be taking charge of the sudden media frenzy and it's all becoming a bit of a mess. With three pieces of silence out there to buy (the original by Cage, the retake of Suggs & co. plus the The Royal British Legion one),  I think there's a real danger of the whole thing going down the drain.

Oh well. I hope it succeeds anyway. I wonder what John Cage would think of it though?

CATM campaign website: http://www.catm.co.uk/