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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the On The Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Michael Loewinger. In early August, Rich Men North of Richmond, a song performed by a man named Christopher Anthony Lunsford, a.k.a. Oliver Anthony Music, was quietly released on YouTube. You might have heard it. Rich Men North of Richmond, Lord knows it all. Just wanna have total control. Wanna know what you think.
What we're hearing is the audio that accompanied Oliver Anthony's YouTube performance. We see him singing at the edge of the woods with his big bushy orange beard, his resonator guitar, and three dogs sleeping at his feet.
A week after the video hit YouTube, the stripped-down folk song rocketed to the top of the Billboard charts. Singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony's populist anthem "Rich Men North of Richmond" went viral over the weekend, causing strong reactions from both conservatives and some progressives. Hey, good morning, George. It is the year's least likely number one single, a complete unknown on solo guitar, with an "us vs. them" message that's been generating a wide range of reaction.
The ascent was highly unusual, maybe even historic. To say that the song garnered a wide range of reactions would be an understatement. The Washington Post accused Anthony of nodding to QAnon, TikTokers dubbed him an industry plant, and left-wing commentators skewered him for the contradictory class politics of his lyrics.
Meanwhile, online right-wing personalities quickly embraced the track as a conservative anthem, while claiming credit for making it a hit.
Chris Melanphy writes a column for Slate called Why Is This Song Number One. Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you. The part of the song that has sparked the backlash and the part of the song that made me wince the first time I heard it comes after the beginning of the song when he's singing about working all day for BS pay, being taxed like hell. He's describing feeling politically, economically disenfranchised. And then he sings this. I wish politicians...
Look out for miners, and not just miners on an island somewhere. Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothing to eat, and the old beast, milk and welfare. God, if you're a foot three, and you're 300, taxes ought not to pay. Bags of fudge rounds, young men are putting themselves six feet in the ground. Because all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down.
Chris, there's so much going on here. There really is. Can you break it down? I mean, I can't pretend to be an expert in what exactly Oliver Anthony means in these lyrics because it's a little incoherent.
He is making working man's music in a kind of proletariat way, in a way that a generation ago would have been considered left-leaning or even socialist. And yet he's complaining about taxes. He's complaining about welfare recipients. Infamously, he's complaining specifically about overweight welfare recipients who are eating fudge rounds.
why he picked that particular Little Debbie snack cake, I'll never understand. Which a lot of people hear is coded racism, basically. That too is a message that the listener brings to the song. Oliver Anthony never specifically mentions race, but many have interpreted the punching down on welfare recipients to be racially loaded. Oliver Anthony has...
proclaimed that he didn't mean it in that way. And there have even been some critics on the left who have argued that it is unfair to read race into Oliver Anthony's complaint. But at the very least, it is a muddled bill of particulars up to and including the Jeffrey Epstein-esque reference to miners on an island somewhere.
This song is a melange of culture war gripes all melded together. And in terms of its popularity, you might say that's more feature than bug for this song because it's probably why it connected with the instant massive audience that it connected and sent it flying to the top of the charts in only a week's time.
I think there is a great muddle of average people who have their own set of grievances, and maybe they don't align neatly to any one political party, but they appreciate somebody speaking truth to power in an angry voice, even if that voice is not entirely sure what it should be complaining about.
Many right-wing personalities, including Matt Walsh, Dan Bongino, pundits on Fox News, saw an authentic messenger for some of their beliefs and ended up pushing it out to their massive followings.
Is it fair to say that they helped it go viral? There's no question that the opening digital consumption of this song was fueled at least in part by right-wing agitation and right-wing advocacy. We would be remiss if we didn't talk about the fact that this song comes just a few short weeks after a song by Jason Aldean called Try That in a Small Town went to number one, which kind of shocked a lot of people. Jason Aldean, the country star, had never had a pop number one.
And frankly, even though country music is having a great year this year, that had less to do with country music's awesome rise than it had to do with the more overtly right-wing message of Try That in a Small Town. ♪ Down here we take care of our ♪ ♪ You cross that line, it won't take long for you to find out ♪ ♪ I recommend you don't try that in a small town ♪
That seemed like kind of backlash to Black Lives Matter. Do you want to describe the music video associated with it? Because I felt like that gave a lot of context to the imagery that was surrounding the song. The video was shot in front of the Columbia, Tennessee courthouse, the same one where infamously Black Lives Matter was held.
The black teen Henry Choate was lynched in 1927. Now, of course, Jason Aldean claims that that was not the intent of the video, but nonetheless, the dropping of the video by CMT, Country Music Television, prompted a full-scale campaign on the right to
to not just stream but buy the song Try That in a Small Town. A little aside for chart watchers like myself is that when you see a song being bought in massive quantities on download stores, the 99 cent download of say iTunes, which was cutting edge 15, 20 years ago, but is now kind of outmoded, you know that folks are buying it to make a point.
Similarly, when Oliver Anthony's Richmond, North of Richmond appeared, it opened with nearly 150,000 downloads in its first week.
Because a dollar paid for a song is seen as much more valuable to Billboard's formula than a fraction of a cent or whatever it is that comes from a stream on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. Exactly. So at least for a moment, it seemed like this song by Oliver Anthony was both a nakedly conservative song and a sort of conservative political act.
like those we've seen recently. You said it debuted at the top of Billboard's Hot 100 chart. Is that common? Debuting at number one on the Hot 100 is relatively common for superstars. It's extraordinarily uncommon for new artists.
And it is literally unprecedented for an artist like Oliver Anthony Music, who has literally no prior chart presence whatsoever. Billboard reported that this was the first song to debut at number one on the Hot 100 by an artist who had never appeared on any Billboard chart of any kind, not country, not pop, which shows you the unusualness and the magnitude of this feat.
And then he was then featured in a question at the first GOP presidential debate. The number one song on the Billboard chart is called Rich Men North of Richmond. It is by a singer from Farmville, Virginia, named Oliver Anthony. By the time it appeared at the debate, the song was already number one.
And people hadn't fully decoded Oliver Anthony yet. Frankly, I'm not sure all these weeks later we still have fully decoded Oliver Anthony. But at that point, Oliver Anthony was still a bit of a blank slate with most folks ascribing MAGA and right-wing talking points to him and the hard right adopting him as their mascot, if you will.
It was fun watching the Republican candidates try to turn Oliver Anthony's cry of rage into a talking point and a fanfare for the common man. However, this prompted Oliver Anthony himself, not a day or two later, to say, oh, well, I found it funny that they were asking about my song because I wrote that song about guys like them. Like, it's aggravating seeing people on conservative news...
Is it just me or is this like very confusing? I mean, it was confusing. I will say that when the song first came out right in that very first week, Anthony was claiming to be, quote, dead center down the aisle on politics.
But everyone doubted that this was true, given the content of the song. It was only in the second week after the question was asked at the Republican debate that he came right out and said that he didn't want to ally himself with the right wing. So for him, centrism, however incoherent, means that he's complaining about all of the rich men north of Richmond on both sides of the aisle.
That doesn't necessarily give a handy explanation for why he's complaining about welfare recipients who eat fudge rounds or why he's as angry about taxes or child trafficking as he is. But at least he tried to play it off that he really didn't see himself as a tool of the right wing.
How much of that do you think is somebody sort of new to fame feeling the kind of shock of having one's personal beliefs and character and personal history scrutinized on that level versus somebody who truly felt they were misunderstood or somebody who doesn't want to alienate a potential section of their fan base? When Oliver Anthony broke in mid-August, one of the
conspiracy theories, particularly on the left, was that he was, quote unquote, astroturfed or an industry plant. And that Oliver Anthony, if you believe this conspiracy, was designed in a lab to be a right-wing talking point spewing working man with an acoustic guitar and a dog and a beard. I think what's come out in the weeks since this song came out is that
Oliver Anthony, say what you want about him. He comes at his political naivete honestly. Mm-hmm.
Perhaps the initial wave of his ascent up the Billboard charts was fueled in part by these purchases, but people are streaming the song too, right? And the streams, at least after the first week, seem to be increasing. So it is an authentic hit, right? It would be uncharitable to ascribe too much importance to that initial right-wing push.
Exactly. In addition to all the downloads, which you can usually compute as being the work of activist purchasers, folks are streaming the bejesus out of the Oliver Anthony song. Interestingly, its streams actually went up in the second week when it spent a second week at number one. So folks are actually consuming this song. When you stream a record, it means that it's actually in the background of your regular life.
This isn't the first time we've seen a song like this, one that kind of storms the charts with a mixed or contested message that divides listeners, right?
Absolutely. The song I analogized, Richmond North of Richmond 2, which was also a number one hit and a fluke number one hit, was the top song of 1966 by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, a song called Ballad of the Green Berets. Fighting soldiers from the sky Fearless men who jump and die Men who mean just what they say The brave men
This is one of the strangest number one hits in Hot 100 history. It is a song by a moonlighting military man who wrote a song in homage to the Army Special Forces unit called the Green Berets at the height of the Vietnam conflict.
talking about how they were brave men and they gave their lives. And it even includes a vignette about a widow finding out that her green beret is not coming home to her. I mean, it's a pretty grim, grisly song.
And it sold millions of copies. It spent five weeks at number one on the Hot 100 in 1966. And like Oliver Anthony, Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler had no prior chart history whatsoever. About the only difference between 2023 and 1966 is back in 66, Barry Sadler had to actually sign with a major label, RCA Records, to get his record pressed and distributed and sold in stores.
but in most other regards, Oliver Anthony and Barry Sadler are really quite similar to each other. The politics of each song is a little muddled. Clearly,
Ballad of the Green Berets is a pro-military anthem. No argument about that. The question is whether it's a pro-war anthem. It was completely out of step with the hits of 1966. And similarly, Oliver Anthony's Richmond, North of Richmond sounds nothing like what's on the radio. It doesn't even sound like current country music. It doesn't sound like Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs. It doesn't even sound like Jason Aldean. It is its own strange curio of a record.
You think that a big part of its success is the production. This is a man with a guitar, it's clean, stripped down. It feels like sort of vintage folk in that way. And then we talked a little bit about this YouTube video of him performing, which is how I first experienced it, and I'm sure many of its fans did. What about his sound and look do you think has helped it become a hit?
The video really did matter for the hit status of Oliver Anthony's song, not least because, of course, YouTube views count toward the Billboard charts now, but also because that image of the Appalachian folk bard with a beard and a dog and a resonator acoustic guitar is part of the image Oliver Anthony is presenting and selling. He wants you to see him as stripped down, as...
lacking artifice. And one point I make in my article is that so-called authenticity is as much a stylistic choice as electronic dance music is a choice. It's, if you will, almost a genre. If you think back about a dozen years ago to when Adele broke on the charts,
She was praised rightly for the quality of her voice. She was praised rightly for the quality of her songs. But many people latched onto Adele because they believed she was, quote, more authentic than what was on the radio at the time, despite the fact that Adele worked with many of the same songwriters as Katy Perry, Maroon 5, and Lady Gaga.
But on a song like Someone Like You, which is just Adele and a piano and no other instruments, that's a stylistic choice. Similarly, when Oliver Anthony does Richmond North of Richmond with nothing but an acoustic guitar in a field with a beard and a dog, that is a stylistic package that he's chosen.
It is now possible with very low cost tools on the average laptop and even cell phone to record something slicker than what Oliver Anthony put into the world. He chose to be this unadorned. At,
At the end of your piece in Slate, you made a very interesting point, not just about Anthony and country music right now on the American music charts, but about a kind of a broader phenomenon. You wrote, some of the same forces that elevated Anthony's weird hit have also made the Hot 100 more admirably weird all year. What's good about the Oliver Anthony phenomenon is that it shows that
Music popularity, more than ever, is a bottom-up phenomenon, and the audience is dictating what the hits are in a way they haven't before. This has been evolving for several years now. You can take it back to such hits as Old Town Road by Lil Nas X. You can point to the rise of All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey becoming a number one hit 25 years after it first came out, driven by streaming numbers.
you can point to We Don't Talk About Bruno, a Disney song where no Disney song like it had ever topped the charts before and it went to number one a couple of years ago.
This year in particular, we've seen some real strangeness on the charts, and I say that with admiration. We've seen a corrido by the regional Mexican group Eslabón Armado and the fast-rising Latin trap king Peso Pluma, a song called Elia Baila Sola, going top five on the charts. I mean, this is regional Mexican music. It's got a waltz tempo and horns.
That's remarkable. We've seen songs like Sure Thing by soul singer Miguel, a guy who hasn't had a hit in over a decade, rise on TikTok and suddenly wind up the number one most played song at Top 40 Radio for several weeks this summer.
Zach Bryan, who currently has the number one album in the country, self-released his original music. He plays acoustic music that sounds like a cross between rock and country. And he's got both the number one album in the country and, as of this week, he just kicked out Oliver Anthony. He's got a number one song as well.
So a lot of stuff that would have been considered commercially outré just a few years ago is now topping the charts. That anarchy, even if I don't particularly love the Oliver Anthony track, I see it as part of a trend that is encouraging and a little random in the best sense.
Chris, thank you very much. Thank you. Chris Melanfi is Slate's Pop Chart columnist, host of their Hit Parade podcast, and author of the forthcoming book, Old Town Road. That's it for the Midweek Pod. Don't forget to tune in this week for an all-new episode of On The Media. What does that girl look like? She's dancing alone.