Question of the Week
What do you think of the viral hit song “Rich Men North of Richmond”?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
Last Tuesday, an obscure YouTube channel was updated with a three-minute-and-10-second video of a man with a red beard and a guitar standing outdoors singing an original song called “Rich Men North of Richmond.” As I write, that video featuring the theretofore unknown singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony has exceeded 18 million views. The song has been uploaded to, and is thriving on, all the major streaming platforms. And it is selling copies. The song reached No. 1 on the all-genre iTunes chart, the Los Angeles Times reported; “Anthony’s other songs, ‘Ain’t Gotta Dollar’ and ‘I’ve Got to Get Sober’ have even relegated Jason Aldean’s controversial ballad ‘Try That in a Small Town’ to the No. 4 position on the chart.”The song’s lyrics probe political themes as surely as Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” or Pulp’s “Common People” or Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” so it’s understandable that political magazines and commentators are talking about it. Still, I’m struck by how little coverage there is of “Rich Men North of Richmond” as art. No song goes this viral without resonating with listeners on an aesthetic level. Nevertheless, even publications that rose to prominence based on their art criticism are covering the song through the lens of politics. A headline in Rolling Stone reads“Right-Wing Influencers Just Found Their Favorite New Country Song.” An article in The A.V. Club poses the question, “So, how did [the song’s success] happen?” and answers, “It’s largely conservatives.” Here’s an excerpt from Variety:
I struggle to imagine a mainstream media site reacting to Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi’s praise of a songwriter by suggesting that the artist is therefore a presumptively leftist act who ought to be covered mainly as a political and politicized phenomenon. At the very least, Anthony should be judged by his own actions and words, not the social-media posts of right-wing opportunists with an incentive to associate themselves with anything popular that is not obviously left-coded. Preemptively assigning figures such as Anthony to existing ideological or culture-war factions is needlessly polarizing and can even be self-fulfilling. Mashable dedicates much of its coverage to the possibility that Anthony has some objectionable right-wing beliefs, whereas almost no one outside the most reactionary right-wing websites cares when a leftist singer-songwriter turns out to have some objectionable left-wing beliefs, because that’s not why millions were attracted to the music. Jay Caspian Kang’s reaction at The New Yorker––co-signed by Eric Levitz at Intelligencer––was among a minority of coverage that took the music seriously.Since the Virginia native’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” song began taking off from out of nowhere less than a week ago, the Appalachian country-folk singer has been acclaimed by freshly minted fans as a phenomenon of the people and accused by detractors of harboring ugly right-wing attitudes or suspected of being an “industry plant.”
The suspicions of progressive music fans have largely to do with the fast numbers he’s racked up as an independent artist with supposedly no industry backing … What’s known about Anthony … comes largely through a YouTube monologue he put up … “I sit pretty dead center down the aisle on politics and, always have,” Anthony says … “I remember as a kid the conservatives wanting war, and me not understanding that. And I remember a lot of the controversies when the left took office, and it seems like, you know, both sides serve the same master. And that master is not someone of any good to the people of this country.”
But if an artist is known by the fans they keep, the highest-profile fans Anthony has quickly accumulated are very much on the right … like former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene … and far-right country figure John Rich … If Anthony wants to prove the centrism he professes by picking up some less partisan public figures as fans, he may have his work cut out for him, given the way he’s instantly been embraced as a hero to the right.
Kang wrote:
If a collection of right-wing Twitter accounts could boost any song to the top of the charts, Jack Posobiec would be the most powerful record executive in the country. There’s something else going on here that can’t be explained through some silly game in which you match the desires of a population with the words that appear in a song and then declare that a people—in this case the white working class—has found their anthem. Anthony might not be some “authentic” sensation, but that doesn’t mean he’s talentless. More than anything, he reminds me of the type of country singer who sings old songs to great acclaim on “American Idol,” but who may ultimately struggle when it comes time to cut a modern album. For the viewer, the delight comes in seeing someone make it but also in the reassurance that there are talented people all over this country who sing in anonymity and who do not bend themselves to fit every musical trend.
Much like “Idol” contestants, such as Bo Bice or Scotty McCreery, Anthony can really sing. His voice isn’t quite as smooth and virtuosic as the country star Chris Stapleton’s, but it carries a similar depth of tone and his screamy rasp never feels like the affectation of an amateur who is trying too hard, but rather does what it’s supposed to do: communicate emotion. What words are put to that voice are far less important than the nostalgia the music evokes, and, in Anthony’s case, the image of the authentic singer-songwriter.
A nuanced discussion of what “authenticity” even means in this context follows.