Just Some Good Ol' Boys: The GOP and Faux-Populism
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When I was just a kid my grandma would open up her player in the front room and spin records. It was one of her prized possessions and she kept it dusted and oiled and ready to go. She’d get started in the morning and get on a roll that lasted until it was time to make dinner. She played country and gospel, all of it lamenting the state of the world and hoping for a better one to come. Sometimes the music would get her going as she chainsmoked in the kitchen. Crying, she’d tell me again the story of our people. Workers, toilers, criminals and sufferers. The world, she’d say, hadn’t been kind. And maybe someday it would.
In recent years it’s been a damn hard thing to have ever liked country music. With the exception of some independent acts who carry the torch, most of it has become a conservative-lite pop culture that launders “inoffensive” hip-hop and pop music into a readily-available container that sells Middle America on its itself and a plethora of overpriced consumer identifiers. Listen and you’ll be ready to buy Chevy and Ram trucks the size of a small house. Vodka that’d be perfect to drink down by the “crick.” Jeans and boots for when you and your girl lay under the stars out by your daddy’s field.
It is, and there is no other way to say this, a crock of shit.
Our political divide has been accompanied, and largely created, by market segmentation that has painstakingly and expertly chopped us into demographic splinters with accompanying products and media that reflects our view of ourselves. Country was a naturally landing point for conservative whites, both in rural and suburban settings, but the results are still hard to swallow.
Recently an undiscovered artist named Oliver Anthony rocketed to the top of the U.S. charts after his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” went viral thanks to the help of Right Wing media. Musically, it stands out because this is far more country and far more organic than anything the heartless factories in Nashville can belch out. Anthony’s performance is real because he feels what he’s singing. He’s not a good-looking model handed a song a few minutes before recording it. There are compelling notes here, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s a Virginian who lives out in the middle of nowhere as opposed to someone playing a gimmick.
A little bit of closer attention reveals everything. “Rich Men North of Richmond” is sort of a protest song, but the focus is misdirected. Sure, those assholes in Washington, D.C. are complicit, but anybody who knows anything about actual politics is pretty clued into the fact that our government has been more or less bought and sold a thousand times over at this point. There are some rich men north of Richmond making things worse for people like Anthony and the rest of us, but, for the most part, they’re not making their primary residence in the nation’s capital.
For the people who bought this song and made it number 1, and for the people who have flocked to see Anthony play in his rural surroundings, it’s probably one of the few things they’ve heard in years that A. sounds like old country music and B. expresses a frustration they feel without trying to sell them a vehicle or luxury item. That earnestness, in a time of cravenness, is refreshing. For the Right Wing tastemakers who made this viral in the first place, Anthony provides something else. Something much, much more valuable.