Nobody understands why a song gets famous, especially since record labels have primarily left promotion to social-media algorithms. I think a song became popular on TikTok as part of a trend I don’t understand when I hear it more than a few times. “Rich Men North of Richmond,” an overnight viral smash by unknown country artist Oliver Anthony, is the uncommon popular song with an explanation. The song, which begins with “I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay,” has millions of social media listens and was the most streamed song in America on iTunes on Tuesday morning. The singer has become a messianic or conspiratorial figure due to his short virality and right-wing pundits like Matt Walsh and Jack Posobiec’s seemingly coordinated tweets about “Rich Men North of Richmond”. Depending on your politics, he is either a voice given from Heaven to articulate white working class wrath or a viral invention that serves up resentment with a thick, folksy Americana.
First off, two obvious things. The lyric, “Livin’ in a new world / With an old soul / These rich men north of Richmond / Lord knows they all just wanna have total control,” should interest anyone who wonders who those “rich men” are. There has also been internet outrage after a mid-song rant about “the obese” who are “five foot three” and “three hundred pounds” and “milkin’ welfare.” One of the only political references in the song is that “your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end,” and Anthony says tax dollars shouldn’t be spent on “bags of fudge rounds.” Unless there’s a secret plan to decrease entitlements for short or overweight individuals, these comments probably didn’t irritate conservatives. Anthony’s statement, “It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to / For people like me and people like you,” is more important.
“Rich Men North of Richmond” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 days after Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” topped the chart. The lyrics of “Small Town” warned people who “sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk,” “carjack an old lady at a red light,” or “pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store” that they wouldn’t get away with such things in a small town “full of good ol’ boys.” This anger made the song popular. Aldean’s song video, which has garnered over twenty-nine million views on YouTube, blends footage to emphasise the lyrics: convenience-store surveillance-camera footage of a heist, young demonstrators flipping off cops and climbing on patrol cars, and shadowy images of small-towners with guns. Do not bring social justice and criminality to our turf or you will be punished.
A few conservative media celebrities who rile up the libs have realised offensive or obliquely political music may be profitable. The conservative-media machine attempted to produce gangster rap through readily managed viral channels with “Try That in a Small Town” and “Rich Men North of Richmond”. Instead of the violence and misogyny of nineteen-sixties conservatism that alarmed boomers, reactionary nostalgia craves for sundown towns and when overweight people didn’t get welfare. The violence is identical.
Whether this gambit works or if Anthony is involved is unknown. He says his political views are “pretty dead center,” and he does seem to rail against both Republicans and Democrats, but until his big break last week, his songs were mostly apolitical small-town anthems that sounded like they were written with a fountain pen dipped in Merle Haggard’s ashes. That isn’t awful, but it’s not novel. In bars across America, melancholy, disillusioned men sing Hank Williams. Why Oliver Anthony? “The main reason this song resonates with so many people isn’t political,” conservative blogger and filmmaker Matt Walsh tweeted. Cause the song is raw and authentic. Artificiality suffocates us. All around us is phoney. A woodsman pouring his emotions into his instrument is real.”
If right-wing Twitter users could make any song number one, Jack Posobiec would be the most powerful record executive in the country. Anthony may be an industry plant put to our social media feeds to promote a nativist image of this country. There’s more to this than matching a population’s wants with a song’s lyrics and declaring that a people—in this case the white working class—has discovered their anthem. Anthony may not be “authentic” but he’s talented. He reminds me most of a country singer who sings classic songs well on “American Idol,” but may struggle to record a current album. The spectator enjoys seeing someone succeed and knowing that brilliant people around the country sing anonymously and don’t conform to every musical fad.
Anthony sings like “Idol” competitors Bo Bice and Scotty McCreery. He doesn’t have the silky, virtuoso voice of country singer Chris Stapleton, but his voice has a similar depth and his screamy rasp never sounds like an amateur straining too hard, instead communicating passion. The memories the music invokes and, in Anthony’s case, the image of the true singer-songwriter are more essential than the words.
In country and blues, “authentic” is a problematic word. It’s one of those things you think you just know when you hear, yet honesty requires a lot of image-making. It usually depicts a lone man with a peculiar instrument in a field surrounded by rustic comforts. This vision transcends country. “The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins,” a short documentary by Les Blank, takes place in junk yards, front porches, and impoverished living rooms. Blank’s camera blurs this environment into a lush bokeh at its best. The Anthony video for “Rich Men North of Richmond” uses these themes. Anthony stands at a microphone with a resonator guitar. The rural South’s vegetation is softly out of focus behind three ambiguous-breed dogs sleeping in the grass at his feet.
I’m not immune to these attractions. I felt that Townes Van Zandt had unveiled the truth about how life can break and drag glamorously. “Well I used to wake and run with the moon / I lived like a rake and a young man” seemed to hint at a deeper truth. In the documentary “Heartworn Highways,” Van Zandt played “Waitin’ Around to Die” in a kitchen with a beautiful woman and an old Black man in a cowboy hat who cried. Any freshman in a critical-studies class might pick apart the markers of authenticity—the wood-panelled kitchen, the lady who alternates between cleaning dishes and smoking a cigarette, and the grizzled Black man who also represents authenticity. They also work.
There are greater revanchist songs than “Rich Men North of Richmond,” but Anthony is neither the worst nor the most reactionary to sing about the common man. The experts who are trying to transform country music into gangster rap by focusing on a few, and in Anthony’s case, foolish lyrics are underestimating how many country songs are about old-time feelings and overestimating how long a viral trend can survive. Oliver Anthony may be playing to decent crowds in a year or two and trying to disassociate himself from “Rich Men North of Richmond” to play the folksy, “authentic” country tunes he like. I believe he may ultimately desire this. ♦
