People like me, people like you

Last week, Rod Dreher posted about the Oliver Anthony Music song “Rich Men North of Richmond” which is going viral. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall, but the first time he mentioned it was here: https://roddreher.substack.com/p/immoderate-greatness .

As much as I have been enjoying Dreher’s writing, when someone tells me that I need to listen or see something “going viral”, my first instinct is to make sure that I don’t watch or listen to it. I’ve always had a stubborn streak like that. I shared one of the other Oliver Anthony songs on my Substack post last week, and I figured that it would be at least a couple of months before I’d revisit the music, because I’ve got other things that I need to be doing.

Even yesterday, if you’d told me that I’d be spending a huge chunk of today listening to “Rich Men North of Richmond”, I wouldn’t have believed you, but life is funny. Yesterday, as I was trying to catch up on others’ posts (which I failed at), I saw a post from Not the Bee about the song, which can be found here: https://notthebee.com/article/check-out-this-outstanding-compilation-of-people-reacting-to-rich-men-north-of-richmond-/https://notthebee.com/article/check-out-this-outstanding-compilation-of-people-reacting-to-rich-men-north-of-richmond-/. Included is a video, which I’ll embed below, of clips of people’s reaction videos to the song:

I’ve been surprisingly impressed with many people’s “reaction videos” on YouTube, so I clicked on the video, and for the first time, I heard the song “Rich Men North of Richmond”. If you haven’t heard it, you should. If you like it, buy it off of iTunes or Amazon.

Wow. Now I have a little bit of a free-spirit, flower-child side to me, and I have been known to embrace protest songs, especially of the 60s. However, I have noticed a definite lack of songs dealing with issues of today. This isn’t anything new, it’s as though most of us in the West have lost our ability to sing after the 1970s. I was impressed by Danser Encore as a “protest song” in 2020. I *think* the group could have been arrested here, what with being maskless and in close proximity to each other. The gist is basically “We just want to dance again” and original French is here:

(If you search my Gab account, you’d be able to find an English translation I wrote.)

The Oliver Anthony Music song “Rich Men North of Richmond” is political, but it isn’t partisan, similarly to “Danser Encore”. Also like “Danser Encore”, it discusses the power wielded down from on high by elites which is used in the name of the people, but makes lives worse. “Rich Men North of Richmond” brings up issues of the “rest of us”, those who work for a living, those who feel we have no voice in what gets decided in Washington (or in Madison or Springfield or any number of places). There is anguish, but I don’t think it’s from a man who has given up, it’s from a man who is standing up and articulating a problem. He may be poor, he may be playing his guitar in his backyard, but he’s no dummy.

This sort of thing resonates. There are a ton of “reaction videos” already and it is stunning to see how many people, hearing this for the first time, are visibly moved, sometimes to tears. What is astounding is that it certainly doesn’t seem to be a song that doesn’t appeal to people based on racial lines, but rather something that has wide appeal to working people – the people who are struggling to make a living and make a life in this world. Furthermore, Anthony explicitly mentions how today’s society is pushing men over the edge, into despair, into suicide.

I’m going to share some of the videos I watched today, and I’ll try to say a line or two about what I think was the best point some of these people made. I think the song resonates with a lot of YouTubers because although I think it’s fair to say that most of them enjoy the craft, it’s a side hustle that requires a lot of work, and there’s not a huge chance that YouTube is going to ever make them enough money to live on – yet they continue on with it.

I think this may be one of the best “all around” reaction videos to the song. The man is a vocal coach, and likely has had a more “comfortable” existence for more of his life, but he understands what the song is about at a very deep level:

A therapist’s take – talking about issues that get raised, especially as the father of boys:

Someone whose family has family who worked in the mines:

By simply doing a Youtube search on the song for reaction videos, probably at least half that show up in the first few pages are from black people, and so far, I haven’t seen a single one where the person hated the song – quite the opposite, actually.

A male/female reaction team:

It’s not just men who feel it either:

If I remember correctly, she talks about how she does Youtube because she loves it, but even with over 23,000 subscribers, she’s not making anything from the videos. She doesn’t mention it explicitly, but it made me think of so much work today boiling down to “gig economy” jobs, and the tradeoffs there.

It is interesting to see how women understand it differently; this woman is deeply moved by it, but it’s much more to the point of how big business is against the little guy, rather than the whole system:

This woman, in making the point about how the song is so much different from what gets played on the radio, insofar as it’s raw and not full of autotune, but makes the further point that even if it reached the top of the charts on Spotify or what have you, the radio probably still wouldn’t play it because it directly calls out the types of people who have the power to choose things like what makes it to the airwaves or what makes it past record executives.

This is of a much more political bent, but the woman is almost in tears thinking about the the price of groceries and the world her small child (who can be heard in the background) is going to inherit:

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I’m sure I still missed some good ones that I watched today, but this is already a lot. There are a couple of things I’d like to add that I didn’t hear anybody bring up. First of all, the lyrics are smart. The “rich men” and “Richmond” play gets mirrored in the “miners/minors” lines. As anguished as a lot of the song is, there’s some wicked humor in it as well, not just with the miners/minors thing, but with the mental picture of a 5’3″, 300lb person with fudge shots, for instance. It’s so hilarious, though, that I think it kind of distracts from the next line leading into the plight of poor, working men.

Musically, the chords are simple, and so is the song, but I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a song structured the way that this one is: it’s something like pre-chorus, chorus, verse 1, verse2, verse 3, pre-chorus, chorus, pre-chorus. I probably have that slightly wrong, but it’s definitely different. The other thing is that he’s playing a resonating guitar, which is similar to a dobro, and gives the song much more of a folk/Appalachian twang than most country music these days would have.

In watching people reacting to the videos, the beginning of the song is bold, and it kind of takes the first-time listener aback a bit. Is this a song by some crazy dude ranting about the government from his doomsday bunker? He goes on, and people start grooving with him a little, and then when he gets to the verses, people’s eyes get wide and their mouths drop open with the line about the miners and the minors because it is so obviously a Jeffrey Epstein reference, but we all know that this sort of talk is “not allowed” on places like radio stations and the like. I did not see one person reacting object to the lines about the cheating of welfare, just a lot of head-nodding and mmhmm-ing because it’s less about the individual, and all about the widespread cheating and corruption in the system. Then the verse about the young men shows up, and with the men, especially, they choke up, because most of them have been through this or know people who are going through it. The lines remind me a lot of my cousin Isaiah, who killed himself a month ago. Men who have been made to feel expendable. Nobody’s talking about that in mainstream music. From that point on, though, the man is “one of us”, so when he reiterates what he sang in the beginning, instead of being caught off-guard, people are saying “Sing it brother!”

It’s also weird that with all the videos I’ve watched, if the people have some idea where Richmond is, they usually can figure out that the “rich men” north of there are the Washington, D.C. elite. However, no one that I have seen has pointed out that Richmond was the Capitol of the Confederacy for the vast majority of its existence, and that it’s only about 100 miles or so from D.C. For that reason alone, Richmond “looms large” historically as a cultural marker of belonging to a different world than D.C. I don’t know if this was a consideration of writing this song, but it certainly came to mind as far as that divide goes, and how even in the days of the Civil War, Washington D.C. was a much richer city than Richmond was.

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Interesting, too, is that as much as this song is thick in the U.S. specific references, it’s resonating outside of the borders of the US as well:

This is a video of a Canadian country music fan. Without going into the specific politics of it, he comments that the struggles are the same in Canada, though probably a good bit worse:

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British reaction, touching somewhat on the surveillance state. I thought he might mention 1984, but he didn’t get that far, but he did talk a lot about website cookies and the like.

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Another Brit, who chokes up talking about how he’s part of the generation who will never be able to own their own homes:

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These two are also in the UK, but probably of Indian heritage. They started the video expecting something much, much different, but ended up having a good conversation about the song nonetheless, even saying that they ought to have their parents have a listen and see how the parents reacted:

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Irish, mentioning how similarly this tracks with traditional Irish music and brings up connections to Sound of Freedom:

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This is a Belgian whose English is very, very good, but I could tell that he was struggling with some of the cultural references. Not only that, but he was live on Twitch as he was making this video, and someone in the chat kept trolling him, saying that he ought to “look more deeply” into the artist and the “politics” of the song, and chastising him for picking something so “right-wing”. The Belgian repeatedly tells him to cut it out, that he is just there to listen to the song, but the commenter persisted, to the point where people started wondering if the guy was just a troll. In trying to prove he wasn’t a troll, the commenter said that he was a journalist from Spain, to which the Belgian told him that he needed to shut up because he doesn’t live in the US and wouldn’t understand this stuff either. The irony lost on the Spaniard is, of course, that many of us have come to see journalists and internet trolls as nearly one in the same. (And in some cases, they are!)

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Argentina. I think they got the gist, but I think there’s a lot that they didn’t get on the first listen. (I mean, there is quite a bit I didn’t catch first listen, and trust me, it’s *much* harder understanding song lyrics in a different language!) There’s a statement in the description that mentions the “controversial lyrics”, but I don’t know that it isn’t something copied and pasted in an effort to not get cancelled themselves. Isn’t that amazing, though?

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Nigeria. This is actually the second reaction video the woman in black did on this song. You can tell that the two young women here are deeply moved, and what comes to mind for them is how corruption destroys a country for its people, especially the young, and an ocean away, it’s what they’re living through too.

https://youtu.be/xkqYII0zWvs

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I’m going to leave you here with a couple of videos about the “phenomenon”.

Glenn Beck, with the Mumford and Sons banjo player who got booted from the band, in large part due to not getting vaccinated for Covid.

Timcast, with some insights into how the music industry today works, based on their own experience releasing a song several months ago.

(Funny, too, that as I was watching videos to write this post, Ace of Spades wrote about the phenomenon of this song as well: Country Protest Song by Oliver Anthony Racks Up 19 Million YouTube Views in 9 Days.)

I wish this artist all the best; I hope that even if he doesn’t end up doing music full-time, that he can earn enough through this to be able to pursue what he’d like in his life. I don’t know if the world has heard much music from the working man’s perspective since Jim Croce (who died in 1973), and that’s a sad thing. If anything, maybe this will inspire others to start doing that as well. In any case, prayers for this young man are certainly in order.

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