As I left my apartment yesterday, one of my housemates alerted me to an atrocity. He wasn’t watching Sky News or dithering on some news blogs. No… he was watching the X Factor. A show I don’t really watch but even if you were just recently dragged out from a cave into the 21st century you have to have been exposed to it indirectly at some point. It’s pop culture to the extreme. Absolute humiliation with unaccredited bile coming from these wannabe artists with as much self-importance as their management can muster up.

A previous winner of the competition (because that’s all it is, the pursuit of fame rather than the pursuit of artistic expression, while we sit at home in our living rooms laughing – and drinking) decided to make a surprise appearance at the final episode of the competition, presumably because she has an album due soon.

To express some emotion and show her 12-year-old fanbase that she’s still relevant, she decided to cover Hurt by Johnny Cash Nine Inch Nails.

Let me be the first one to say that I’m a huge lifelong fan of NIN. Even the worst NIN track (hint: it doesn’t exist) is unmeasurably better than anything anyone from X Factor can do. Partially because NIN tracks were written by people with emotion powering their desire to get creative.

For those not in the know, Hurt is a track that appears on the NIN album that introduced me to the band, The Downward Spiral. Now, most people who listen to real music knows that this album is special – even if you weren’t into the industrial stuff at the time. People who listen to real music and have listened to this album knows that Hurt is the final crescendo on that album. The song before it is the title track. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand what a drug infested, pain riddled and emotionally unstable Trent Reznor might have been going through when those two tracks ended an album that spurred on fame and his eventual clean up (both emotionally and physically). I don’t see it as a coincidence that the 10 year anniversary version of the album had a “clean” version of Hurt that made the track a bit simpler by removing the industrial under-tone that lined the entire track originally.

Track forward to 2011 and some dink who goes to a rehearsal studio is told she’s covering Johnny Cash’s last hurrah, Hurt. Good call Louis Cowell, or whomever handles the trivial PR stuff like what song to sing.

If you watch the performance (and that’s all it really is) you can see all the emotion spilling from the red dressed simple girl from England. It’s tear inducing how real her emotions are as she sings someone elses lyrics. You can tell she feels every single bit of the pain and anguish. She knows that shoving a needle into her skin is something she feels she needs but ultimately will kill her. She’s in pain.

These are the kinds of emotions you often see in films. With actors. Another word for it is: pretending.

The performance is so contrived it’s irritating me to the point where I actually had to write over 500 words (so far) on it.

It’s this kind of shit that has the music industry gasping for air. Instead of giving creative freedom to creative types the industry is more interested in butchering older, well known ish (to the pop loving kids) tracks so that the vague recollection of the song is dulled by the new cover of it enough to make it feel original to a 15 year old.

The problem is that some Dad, uncle or older brother is going to bring their kid or relative to a Leona Lewis concert and she’s going to pour all that fake emotion into Hurt at the end of her set. The Dad will remember the first time he heard that track at the end of an incredibly moving album. He’s going to see the contrived look on this dink’s face on stage and just go apeshit, murdering everyone in his general vicinity. Then he’ll go home and listen to The Fragile to make himself feel better.

Thank god there’s still creative people out there, and thank god Trent Reznor is doing more NIN material next year.