It's a brilliant bit of wordplay, for a start. Cage Against the Machine is the campaign to put John Cage's infamous silent piece, 4'33'', on top of the Christmas charts – and to consign whatever X-Factor effort Simon Cowell chooses to unleash on an unsuspecting public to mid-chart mediocrity. Based on last year's successful bid to make Rage Against the Machine king of the Crimbo hit-parade, this year's Cage campaign already has nearly 50,000 people signed up to it on Facebook, with all proceeds going to charity when the single becomes available on 13 December.
It's self-evidently a good thing, but there's much more to CATM than the statistics. 4'33'' has a unique capacity to offend, to shock, and to entertain, nearly six decades after its premiere at the Maverick Concert Hall at Bard College in August 1952, when pianist David Tudor sat down at the piano to play – well, not a single note. 4'33'' is also one of the very few pieces in history that has crossed from the avant-garde to the mainstream. When the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed it the Barbican in London in 2004, the Sun carried the story, and just as many listeners were outraged as were thrilled by 4'33'''s three movements of silence.
The CATM campaigners want 4'33" to win the Christmas poll to "make it a silent night on Radio 1". They're closer to Cage's original intentions than some of them might know. According to Kyle Gann's recent book on 4'33", Cage may have conceived the idea of his silent piece as a reaction to a postwar urban America and its near-constant soundtrack of muzak. A few months before the premiere of 4'33'', Cage cut out an article from the New York Post, which imagines a jukebox with silent singles, giving people the chance to escape the tyranny of continual aural bombardment. If the idea of a temporary respite from noise pollution was a good idea in 1952, it's even more necessary now.
But as Gann's book shows, there's, "no such thing as silence", even when you're talking about 4'33''. Think about the two minutes' silence on 11 November: what you hear is never "nothing", but a heightened soundscape of quietness that you never normally notice: the shuffling and breathing of your fellow human beings if you're in a crowd, or the sonic landscape of the city that you don't normally notice.
The essential non-silence of "silence" is especially true for one of the people putting together the new version of 4'33" that will be released in time for Christmas. DJ Eddy Temple-Morris suffers from tinnitus (the British Tinnitus Association is on the charities that will benefit from sales of the track), and the final track looks like it will be a remix of ambient sounds and background noise.
That's fine, and in the spirit of Cage's ideas, but I hope it doesn't end up being too loud. The poetry of trumping Cowell et al with no intentional sounds requires the track to be as quiet as possible to make Cage's victory complete. 4'33'' has long been the avant-gardistas No 1, but perhaps it can now become the people's favourite too. Imagine next year's X Factor auditions, as contestant after contestant announces that they won't be singing Lady Gaga or Madonna, but 4'33''. ITV forced to broadcast hour after hour of silence as Cowell and co look on in bemusement, and have to give everyone three yesses for their impeccable renditions of one of the great masterpieces of 20th century music. Remember: 4'33" is not just for Christmas ...