John Cage’s 1952 non-musical track, 4’33”, is the subject of a new campaign to prevent the winner of reality television show The X Factor taking the coveted #1 spot on the UK Singles chart at Christmas time. Last year, a similar campaign was run, encouraging people to buy a digital download version of Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name Of, and it was successful in selling about 500,000 copies, which was around 50,000 more than X Factor winner Joe McElderry’s single, The Climb.
“Let's repeat the success of the “Killing In The Name of” Christmas number one in 2010 with 4 minutes and 33 seconds of avant garde silence,” urges the newest Facebook campaign, which was officially launched today but has attracted more than 22,000 “Like”’s in the past few weeks.
Organisers plan to remind people on December 13 to purchase the single in order for the sales to be counted in the crucial week prior to the Christmas chart. The Facebook page administrators will send an email alert if people register on the site.
Cage said of the confused response to a performance of 4’33”, which is supposedly divided into three movements and has since become one of music’s greatest controversies - “They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
