1992 single by professional pseudo-revolutionaries Rage Against The Machine. Became Christmas Number One in Britain in 2009. Total heap of rancid, worm-infested shyte - and the Rancid, Worm-Infested Shyte Liberation Front have probably just put a price on my head for that grave insult to their cause as a result of this writeup.
There is nothing revolutionary or subversive about this song - or indeed about RATM - in any way whatsoever, unless you're a 15-year-old who can't be arsed to tidy your room, get to bed at a reasonable hour, or do your homework. Which, incidentally, is what that chorus line, "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" sounds like. The song is a ham-fisted attempt at sounding rebellious and socially aware - much like everything else by RATM, actually - with its generic railing against the government and identikit pretend socialism.
A delicious irony is that those who pushed the Facebook campaign to get RATM to number one to keep the X Factor off the top spot seemed to have overlooked the fact that RATM's record label, Sony Music Entertainment, is also that of all Simon Cowell's dross, and that in fact, Mr Cowell is a major shareholder in said Sony Music Entertainment. Whoops! So regardless of whether that idiot from The X Factor got to number one or RATM, for him it's dividends all round, chaps.
I am actually ashamed to own a RATM album, however, I've never listened to it all the way through as it bores me. It actually is all the same. Limp wristed hardcore punk riff, feedback, blurty vocal lines set to a rap delivery about the latest cause du jour about what the champagne socialists of America are getting butthurt lately... ugh. Spare me. Then there's the fact that they wear their progressiveness on their sleeve by putting in the inlay all the charities and pressure groups that they support - which kind of leaves the impression that they're more into cockwaving about their right-on-ness rather than actually doing something about it. Have you seen Tom Morello dig an artesian well in poverty- and preventable-disease stricken Africa recently? Thought not. He's too busy coining it in from songs that appeal to 15-year-old angstbuckets and sneering, snobbish hipster types who still think going to Glastonbury is being radical (newsflash: you're 30+ years too late, o ye of the long shorts and mummy-and-daddy paid-for gap year gallivants). Because to the intended audience of this song, owning a RATM album is a sign of being a superior form of life because it's, like, so political and making a statement and really sticking it to The Man - which, as you will no doubt know from the above paragraph, is egregiously wrong.
I suppose the fact that "Killing in the Name" got to number one really sums up the 2000s - a decade of sneering champagne socialism and, in Britain at least, a national inability to take responsibility and do our collective homework in any and all spheres of existence. Because we'd rather just say, "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."