This Christmas, for the second year in succession, there is a concerted campaign to prevent a pop star nurtured by Simon Cowell reaching Britain's cherished end-of-year No 1 slot. Last week the final round of The X Factor, the television programme on which Cowell is the main judge, drew about 20 million viewers, the most for a non-sporting event in the UK for more than 10 years. But buoyed by their success last year stopping The X Factor winner by catapulting rock band Rage Against the Machine into the yuletide top slot, this year's guerrilla campaign urges music lovers to buy (or download) John Cage's pioneering 4'33", a piece that famously consists of nothing but silence — their aim being again to foil Cowell, and in passing this year's X Factor victor, Matt Cardle.
It is an inspired strategy, for there is nothing Cowell dislikes more than the sound of silence. The clamorous entertainment franchises that he has helped to create, and on which he himself stars with no little bravura, have swallowed prime-time television schedules on both sides of the Atlantic. They have also made him the second most highly paid TV star in the world, after Oprah Winfrey. With a fortune estimated at £165 million (Dh941 million), Cowell has become a pop impresario like no other.
Remarkably, he has also made the business of popular music more compelling to watch than its sickly output. Today, it is the "star-maker machinery behind the popular song", as Joni Mitchell disparaged in the hippy-inflected 1970s, that attracts record television audiences; the judges' comments on the acts are prized more highly than the performances that precede them.
Since launching Pop Idol with his one-time friend Simon Fuller in 2001, Cowell's rise to power has been relentless. He became a judge on American Idol a year later, formed his own company, Syco, in 2002, and then launched The X Factor, which features aspirant pop stars drawn from regular backgrounds, in 2004. That franchise, currently produced or licenced by FremantleMedia Enterprises in more than 20 territories, is one of the most successful in global entertainment today.
Frenetic standards
Next year promises to be eventful, even by Cowell's frenetic standards. He has now left American Idol — "I got bored," he says of the end of his eight-year rise to transatlantic superstardom — and plans to take on Fuller with his own US version of The X Factor. Both programmes will appear in the US on the Fox Channel. And if there is one thing Cowell enjoys more than delivering polished barbs admonishing poorly performing pop acts in front of millions, it is competition.
Already there is frenzied speculation as to the identities of Cowell's fellow judges in the US version. Will pop starlet Cheryl Cole make the trip with him? Will George Michael get a crack at some much-needed career rehabilitation? Certainly the formula will be as delicately calibrated as for any boy band. Cowell, who will almost certainly feature in the show, has signed powerful allies for the next stage of his entertainment world domination: last year he formed a company with friend and confidant Sir Philip Green, the Topshop magnate, and Sony which will hold the rights to all of Cowell's shows, including The X Factor in the US.
Indeed, Cowell has now achieved that state of grace in which it is almost impossible to imagine him failing.
He himself attributes his success to hard work — he sleeps erratically — and having a low boredom threshold. A notorious control freak, even he has his limits: he says he came close to giving it all up one day in the summer of 2009 when he looked at his future schedule and saw that it was fully accounted for until the end of 2010. But perhaps he realised that 2011 was going to be pretty special, too.
Like any resonant cultural figure, Cowell holds up a mirror to the society that produced him. He lives in a world that is less expectant of its pop stars to say anything original, but finds ever more creative ways of making money from them: no one has done more in helping to illuminate the manufacturing component in pop stardom: the makeovers, the diets, the marketing strategies.
In The X Factor, both judges and contestants hit the stage to the grandiloquent strains of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, a testament to our infatuation with the sheer bombast of 21st-century entertainment. Rage Against the Machine may well achieve its four minutes and 33 seconds of revenge against Cowell this Christmas. But no victory would be more futile.
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