“Rich Men North of Richmond” Is a Populist Anthem Lost in Its Own Grievance

The present focus of the U.S.’s unending tradition struggle comes within the type of the music, “Wealthy Males North of Richmond,” by Oliver Anthony, aka Christopher Anthony Lunsford, a former manufacturing unit employee, who has been open about his battles with alcoholism and despair. Driving a wave of viral consideration, “Wealthy Males” has now spent two weeks at the number one spot on the Billboard Sizzling 100 Charts. The music has a agency musical resonance — finished within the high lonesome type that’s the hallmark of bluegrass — and is an completed and trustworthy work. Additionally it is, unhappy to say, a problematic try to handle a sophisticated, even unimaginable, scenario.

Anthony’s music comes on the heels of Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” — a posturing and fewer honest work, extolling the “superiority” of outer-urban U.S. In contrast to Aldean, nevertheless, “Wealthy Males” has a extra populist enchantment, railing in opposition to the highly effective wanting to manage every thing, having to work for bullshit pay and wishing politicians would look out for miners as an alternative of supporting individuals like Jeffrey Epstein and the politicians who courted him. The music additionally ignorantly assaults individuals receiving welfare — most of whom are youngsters, the aged or disabled — and victims of weight problems (slightly than the poisonous, yet profitable, diet People are fed).

Anthony is just not, as Phil Ochs recommended artists to be, “a couple of steps forward” of his time. Quite, he’s steeped within the second and at instances, deliberately or not, assumes a reactionary stance. That is evident within the music’s title. Richmond, Virginia, was the capital of the Confederacy. As such, it isn’t the very best geographic marker for the divide between good and evil.

Publish-Industrial U.S.

Comic Jim Gaffigan recently joked that he comes from the Rust Belt — particularly Elgin, Indiana, a metropolis 800-odd miles north of Richmond. The Rust Belt, he mentioned, is “a cute catchy time period to explain areas of financial devastation.” This will get at one thing about Anthony’s music which has been given much less consideration than it deserves, how deindustrialization has reworked the complete nation’s panorama. Take, for instance, the miners Anthony says politicians should be looking for. In 1923, there have been over 800,000 coal miners within the U.S., however at present there are little greater than 55,000 — automation and expertise eradicated the necessity for any extra. To suppose that scenario might be reversed — even when it weren’t environmentally suicidal — is an phantasm of the primary order. One may observe that instance out to a mess of industries, from metal, to auto, to rubber, and the one affordable conclusion is that we’re headed deeper into, not diverging away from, a post-industrial U.S. The times of jobs the place somebody with nothing greater than a highschool diploma may attain a middle-class life are lengthy gone.

As such — and regardless of the very best intentions of artists like Billy Bragg, who penned a response to Oliver’s music suggesting the reply is to “be a part of a union” — for the tens of millions of individuals with out the years of coaching wanted to suit them profitably into the up to date economic system, there isn’t a want for them — and even for individuals with such abilities, AI looms. For many of them, there is no union to join. That’s the chilling actuality undergirding Anthony’s music — and why it has resonated with so many.

Music and Populism

The organized proper has tried to assert this music as its personal as a result of it appeals to individuals — together with many who voted for each Barack Obama and Donald Trump — who’re disaffected and as such may doubtlessly, and in opposition to their very own pursuits, assist the Republican Get together. That’s why Ron DeSantis, when requested in the course of the latest Republican presidential debate why he thought the music was placing such a nerve, responded, “Our nation is in decline. The decline is just not inevitable. It’s a alternative.” He went on to say the reply is to vote Joe Biden out of workplace. The irony right here is that DeSantis, and Trump (a wealthy man each north and south of Richmond), to a level, are right in mentioning the U.S.’s decline — by any measure, the nation has traveled a good way away from its unchallenged hegemony within the quick aftermath of World Struggle II. Nonetheless, their rationale for why that’s the case, and their treatments — minimize taxes for the wealthy, raid Social Safety and Medicare, additional criminalize immigration, subjugate ladies, energize white supremacists, assault LGBTQ individuals, remove the educating of Black historical past, push the nation nearer to a non secular theocracy — are one million miles away from addressing the precise issues individuals are confronting. In reality, these demagogues are primarily out to bolster themselves and the wealthy and highly effective males (and ladies) who profit from Republican political management — and they’re going to do almost something to attain that.

Sadly for Anthony, he has waded into waters deeper than any artist would wish to discover themselves in. In an interview a couple of days after DeSantis’s remarks he tried to distance himself from these attempting to applicable or disparage him. As he advised the press, he truly wrote the music “about these individuals,” and complained, “I see the right attempting to characterize me as one among their very own and I see the left attempting to discredit me.” Bruce Springsteen confronted an analogous conundrum when Ronald Reagan tried to applicable “Born in the USA” — a broadside in opposition to the ravages of the Vietnam Struggle and a deindustrializing U.S. — as an anthem for his 1984 Morning in America marketing campaign. In response, Springsteen told Rolling Stone, “It’s not morning in Pittsburgh. It’s not morning above a hundred and twenty fifth Road in New York. It’s midnight, and … there’s a nasty moon risin’.” Populism, whether or not left- or right-inclined, is a slippery slope as a result of it doesn’t function exterior or above the dominant energy relations; as such it’s open, desired or not, to all method of co-option.

Whose Land?

Right here it’s price speaking about one other music steeped in controversy. Within the winter of 1940, Woody Guthrie made his manner from California to New York Metropolis, hitchhiking by way of the bitterness and chilly of the Despair-era panorama. Alongside the way in which, he continuously encountered Kate Smith’s recording of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” As he listened, he grew to become more and more incensed by the music’s jingoism and disrespect for these struggling within the nation. When he lastly acquired to New York, ensconced in actor Will Geer’s condominium, he wrote the lyrics to what would grow to be “This Land Is Your Land.” Whereas that music, too, is a subject of controversy — is it a thinly veiled wink to communism, an anthem of “the true America,” or an insult to Indigenous individuals? — it’s a controversy of a distinct order. What units “This Land” other than “Richmond,” is that, slightly than rising out of confusion and despair, it was a results of Guthrie’s socialist inclinations — he was a robust supporter of the Communist Get together. As such Guthrie’s populism didn’t wallow in grievance however as an alternative sought to see past indicators of “personal property” to a land whose bounty was held in widespread.

“This Land Is Your Land,” nevertheless, was written at a second when america — for higher or worse — was on the rise as a geopolitical and industrial energy. On the identical time the Soviet Union, which for some appeared to be another, impressed artists like Woody Guthrie to check a greater world. That world, nevertheless, is a spot that’s now far prior to now. Guthrie, too, is now lengthy gone. As a substitute, we discover ourselves in a world of hassle, with no straightforward solutions. To the diploma it hits the mark, “Wealthy Males North of Richmond” embodies that conundrum. That mentioned, higher songs are wanted.

A notice of due to Irka Mateo for her help with this piece.