 This video is brought to you by Audible. Go to audible.com slash polyphonic or text polyphonic to 500 500 to get started today. On November 2, 1992, Rage Against the Machine released their first major label single, Killing in the Name. Written in response to police brutality and the Rodney King riots, that song condemned authoritarian violence in the United States. It even went so far as to criticize the institutionalized racism of the police force by comparing them to the Ku Klux Klan. And while all of these facts helped the song gain momentum as a piece of radical protest, it was the song's iconic outro that propelled it to anthem status. Pulling back into a broad denial of authority, Zack Dolorosa screams, fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. Mix in the heavy groove of Tim Comerford and Brad Wilk and the wild guitar of Tom Morello, and you have the recipe for Rage Against the Machine's signature song. It was a sign of all the band would come to represent and it lived up to their radical name. Of course, the song's violent nature and overt swearing prevented it from having much chart success, though it did actually manage to chart in the UK, initially hitting number 25 in 1993. But then, 16 years later, a strange thing happened. Rage Against the Machine found the song climbing the UK charts once more, and in the week of Christmas 2009, Killing in the Name defied all odds and topped the UK charts. Let's take a closer look. The Christmas number one is a big deal in the United Kingdom. Getting a lot of airplay over Christmas has a huge cultural impact, and often the song that tops the charts at Christmas becomes the best-selling single of the entire year. While there had always been Christmas number ones, they didn't really become notable until the early 70s. That was when a pair of glam rock bands Slade and Wizard released seasonal songs in hopes of finding some chart success. And they both did, dueling it out in the weeks leading up to Christmas, until Slade's Mary X-Mess everybody took the title. From there, seasonal songs found themselves on the Christmas charts with semi-regularity. This included a number of charity singles. Three different versions of Band-Aids Do They Know It's Christmas took the coveted slot in 1984, 1989, and 2004 respectively. Then, in 2005, a new trend started. That year, the Christmas number one spot belonged to Shane Ward, the winner of the singing competition show The X Factor. X Factor winners went on to take Christmas number ones in the next three consecutive years. This trend rubbed a lot of the British public in the wrong way, including one man in particular, John Mortar. Mortar was a part-time DJ who took issue with X Factor and the man behind it, Simon Cowell. And so in 2008, Mortar started a campaign to try to dethrone that year's X Factor winner, Alexandra Burke. The song that Mortar hoped would take her down? Why, of course, the biggest meme song of 2008 and of all time. Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. That first campaign had limited success. It managed to get Astley's song up to number 73 on the charts, but that obviously wasn't nearly enough. And so Burke's cover of Hallelujah took the number one slot. But this didn't stop Mortar, it only inspired him. And so the next year, as the Christmas season rolled round, Mortar and his wife Tracy started a Facebook campaign. They kicked this campaign off with a message posted on Facebook on December 2nd, 2009. Fad up with Simon Cowell's latest karaoke act being Christmas number one, Me Too. So who's up for a mass purchase of the track Killing in the Name from December 13th as a protest to the X Factor monotony? And something about this stuck. While Never Gonna Give You Up had a meme quality to it, Rage Against the Machine had a real message behind them. Even if X Factor was a few steps removed from the origins of Killing in the Name, the sentiment behind the anti-authoritarian outro seemed to be the perfect response to the clean corporate pop of X Factor. The campaign quickly gained momentum and by December 10th, the official Facebook group had swelled to half a million users. Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello came out in support of a campaign and other famous musicians jumped on board too. Even Paul McCartney backed it. Of course, all this talk was one thing, but action was required to get Killing in the Name onto the charts. And so the week before Christmas, people flocked to digital music stores to purchase Killing in the Name en masse. It quickly became clear that Rage Against the Machine had a real shot at taking the number one slot. And as the campaign grew, BBC took note. On December 17th, BBC Radio 5 jumped in on the trend and had Rage Against the Machine on to play Killing in the Name on their breakfast show. The BBC requested that Rage Against the Machine self-censor the performance, and when the outro came round, De La Rocha began without dropping F-Ball. But of course, you can see the oversight here from a mile away. If you tell the band who shouts, fuck you, I won't do what you tell me what to do, you really can't expect them to comply. And so on live public radio, Zach De La Rocha furiously delivered the song's iconic chant. Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me, I won't do what you tell me, fuck you! BBC scrambled to fade the song and apologized profusely, but the damage had been done. This controversy gave even more publicity to Rage Against the Machine and the campaign, giving it the last push that it needed. And on December 20th, 2009, Killing in the Name took the number one spot on the British charts. The campaign had succeeded. But this was more than just a protest against the music industry. Tapping into the ethos of Rage Against the Machine, the mortars encouraged people to raise money for a UK homeless charity, and Tom Morello donated his royalties from the campaign to a British charity as well. In the next week, Killing in the Name had fallen to number two, and it was off the charts a few weeks later. But the campaign still remains a huge moment in music history. And ten years on, it's a reminder that individual people do have the power to stand up against major labels, and a reminder that individual people do have the power to shape the musical world. Something that I've always loved about Rage Against the Machine is that they're an incredibly well-read band, so much so that they used to even have a recommended reading list on their website. If you want to check out some of the books on that reading list, Audible is a great place to start. Audible is the best place to find audiobooks online. They've got an unbeatable selection as well as original audio content. So you can channel your inner rage and listen to Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by the great Henry David Thoreau. Or if you want something more music focused, you could check out Miles, the autobiography of Jazz legend Miles Davis. One of my favorite things about audiobooks is how versatile they are. When you're on your commute, running errands, or working out, you can also be learning new things and getting caught up on your reading list. If you join Audible, you'll get three titles every month. One audiobook and two Audible originals. And if you find that you don't like one of your books, you can easily exchange it for something else. So why not give it a shot today? If you go to audible.com slash polyphonic, or text polyphonic to 500-500, you can get three months for just 6.95 a month. So give it a shot and treat yourself for the holidays. Before I go, I just wanted to thank you guys all so much. I'm taking two weeks off, so this will be the last video of the year. And polyphonic has come a long way this year, and I wouldn't have been able to do it without you guys. So thank you for all of your support.