2023-09-02 07:00:00
On August 23, 2023, the first Republican primary debate took place. Although Donald Trump, who is skyrocketing in the polls, decided to skip the appointment, all the other party figures gathered in Milwaukee, where they were questioned by two figures from Fox News, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. MacCallum opened the debate by addressing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and asking why a song by country call “Rich Men North of Richmondstruck a chord with the country so much.
DeSantis’s response, which expanded on the decline of the United States, matters little. What is striking is the importance that the song written and performed by Oliver Anthony (stage name of Christopher Anthony Lunsford), a complete stranger a few weeks before. It was not until August 8, 2023 when “Rich Men North of Richmond» was posted on YouTube. In a few days, the song became a musical and political phenomenon: it topped the American charts (and the Billboard Global 200, which measures performances around the world) and surpassed Taylor Swift, whose summer tour is in the process of breaking all records. At the same time, the song has become a true political anthem, applauded by Marjorie Taylor Greene, worrisome Georgia representative and movement icon. QAnon, and Joe Rogan, a libertarian figure. Following in the footsteps of the red caps MAGAT-shirts with the song’s title are becoming the new favorite accessory of the American radical right.
For his part, Oliver Anthony has spoken several times about his song. First, he described himself as “dead center” politically, adding that Democrats and Republicans serve “the same master.” In other words, this “neither right nor left,” to use the title of a famous study by Zeev Sternhell, with conspiratorial overtones, evokes less the center than a rejection of traditional elites, be they Democrats or Republicans, that is at the heart of his song, and explains, in part, his success among Donald Trump’s electorate, which has created strong demand for insurrectionary populism. Later, Oliver Anthony further clarified the contours of his political stance by deploring the appropriations that Republican leaders have made of “Rich Men North of Richmond«: «This song has nothing to do with Joe Biden. It is much more important than Joe Biden. This song is about the people on that stage [los líderes republicanos durante el debate de las primarias] and of many other things, not only of them».
His success is not very different from «Hillbilly Elegy«, published in June 2016, for which «Rich Men North of Richmond» is like an original soundtrack. At the time, JD Vance, a Yale law graduate from a modest Appalachian family (although he grew up in Ohio), described the growing desperation of the white working classes in rural, small-town America. Despite its modest beginnings, the book became a huge success following an interview with Vance in The American Conservative: At the time, this anti-Trump conservative was seen as both a credible interpreter of Trump’s success and genuine empathy for some of his voters. Since then, Vance has grown so close to Trump that he won his endorsement in the 2022 Senate race in Ohio and into the Upper House.
It is impossible to know what Oliver Anthony will do with his sudden success, but let’s say that, although the genre is generally associated with progressive struggles, «Rich Men North of Richmond»has all the hallmarks of a paleoconservative protest song: minarchist, anti-elitist, isolationist, and hostile to free trade. The fact that this chose «hillbilly» take the form of a song country says it all. In existence for a century—Fiddlin’ John Carson’s pioneering recordings in Atlanta in 1923 are often considered his birth certificate—the genre is still one of the two most famous in the United States, where it is especially popular in the inland states. Despite its complex origins, which mix folklore traditions from the British Isles with influences from bluesmusic country has been gradually reduced to music”hillbilly«, confined to white and rural America. The erasure of its complex history has also established it as a genuinely popular music, distinct from pop—despite the fact that Nashville’s music industry (the music capital) is said to country) represents $10 billion in annual revenue and 56,000 jobs. Oliver Anthony’s success is due, in part, to the authentic image of him: in the video for “Rich Men North of Richmond«, appears alone, with his guitar and a T-shirt from Goochland, a small town in Virginia. Apparently, it was recorded and disclosed without intermediaries. Without a producer or record company, Oliver Anthony is a kind of prophet or hermit of countrywho calls his compatriots.
In short, the virality of this song echoes the new political forms that have emerged on the right of the American political spectrum: Oliver Anthony is praised precisely because he speaks directly to his audience.
I sell my soul; I work all day;
Overtime for worthless wages
To sit there, to waste time,
And come home to drown all my torments.
It’s a shame the world has come to this,
For people like you, for people like me.
If I could only wake up and see that it’s not true,
But it is, oh yes, it is.
Living in a new world
With an old soul:
The rich north of Richmond.
The reference to Richmond is not random. During the Civil War (1861-1865), Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. If Oliver Anthony’s message is aimed at moneyed elites who don’t care about real Americans, it is symptomatic that they are “north” of the Confederate capital. Although he sings with a thick southern drawl, it’s clear that he plays into a heavily charged historical intertext. More generally, the image of simplicity rooted in rural America and in religion (which we will return to later) that he proposes is a way of reactivating the stereotype of a deeply decent and courteous South (“Southern manners” have been subjected to of numerous appropriations, from the Civil War to the present), totally opposed to an urban, disturbing and violent North. Certain paleoconservative thought has emphasized southern traditionalism –or Confederate– as a way of defending localism and the rights of the States against the tyrannical development of the federal State after the Civil War.
God knows they all want to control us.
They want to know what you think, what you do…
They think you don’t know, but I know you do.
Your dollar is worthless and they tax you up to your neck
For these rich north of Richmond.
If politicians thought about minors
And not in minors on a remote island…
Lord, there are people on the street who have nothing to eat
And the obese who are stuffed with social benefits…
God, if you’re 1.60 m tall and weigh 136 kilos,
Taxes shouldn’t pay for your bags of candy.
Youngsters go six feet underground
Because this damn country won’t stop crushing them.
Lord, what a shame the world has come to this!
For people like you, for people like me,
If I could only wake up and see that it’s not true,
But it is, oh yes, it is.
Living in a new world
With an old soul:
The rich north of Richmond.
God knows they all want to control us.
They want to know what you think, what you do…
They think you don’t know, but I know you do.
Your dollar is worthless and they tax you up to your neck
For these rich north of Richmond.
I sell my soul; I work all day.
Overtime for worthless salary.
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