https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/02/oliver-anthony-and-the-woke-hatred-for-the-working-class/
The thing I love most about Oliver Anthony, aside from that apocalyptic timbre in his country singing, is that he’s forced the elite to unmask itself. We live under elites-in-denial. ‘We’re not the establishment!’, cry the movers and shakers of the upper middle-classes, even as they force your kids to genuflect to gender ideology, screw up economic growth with their climate-change hysteria, and dictate with Caesar-like conviction what is and isn’t sayable in the modern town square of social media. And yet in their foaming response to Mr Anthony, they’ve told on themselves. They’ve revealed that they know perfectly well who this red-bearded warbler from Farmville, Virginia is singing about in his rebellious ballads against The Man: it’s them.
Anthony has become a viral sensation since his song ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ hit the internet. His pained anthem – think Nashville with a dash of Nietzsche – is No1 in the US. He’s hob-nobbing with Joe Rogan. He’s fawned over by top Republicans (much to his irritation. ‘I. Don’t. Support. Either. Side’, is his wise take on America’s polarised politics.) And he’s generated miles of commentary as coastal elites who normally only encounter men in beards when a hip barista hands them their seven-dollar coffee try to work out why this fella from Farmville has hit a nerve.
In short, his protest song has done what protest songs are supposed to. It’s shaken shit up. It’s rattled our rulers. That’s the brilliant irony of someone like Billy Bragg writing in the Guardian of all places that Anthony’s song isn’t truly ‘blue collar’ and thus is not a proper protest song. Mr Bragg, that Anthony offends a cultural turncoat like you, the Eighties outsider turned bien pensant bore, and that he horrifies the plummy scribes of the Guardian who probably think Farmville is an iPhone game, is all the proof we need that this is a protest song, and a good one.
Anthony’s genius is that he has forced our elites-in-denial to do what elites must occasionally do: demonise dissent. Just as old establishments bristled at Elvis’s sexy hips or the Sex Pistols’ anarchical antics or Sinéad O’Connor’s blasphemies against Rome, so the new establishment loses sleep over Anthony’s angry crooning on ‘bullshit pay’, high taxes and obese folk who live off welfare. He’s ‘punch[ing] down on the poor’, says Bragg in the Guardian – which is rich from a newspaper that spent the past seven years raging against the dumb gammon (ie, pigs) who voted for Brexit.
Anthony embodies country’s ‘nastiest impulses’, tuts Time magazine. His songs feel ‘parochial to the point of bigotry’, it says. The Independent’s culture reporter damns ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ as ‘doggerel’. Worse, it’s ‘artless’, a ‘blunt-force hissy fit’. That’s what The Man has always said about the musical revolts against him – that they’re gauche, trashy, with a huge chip on their shoulders. Blue-rinse Christians said it about punk; now twentysomething woke graduates say it about Oliver Anthony.
One of the funniest sights of recent weeks has been liberal columnists poring over Anthony’s lyrics and class-splaining why he’s not a Real Protest Singer. Listen to Woody Guthrie, not this, they plead, like those right-on whites in the 1990s who were aghast that some blacks seemed to prefer the nihilistic swagger of NWA to the righteous anti-racism of Public Enemy.
