If there is a right-wing cultural aesthetic in America, it is low-brow resentment. The old liberal-conservative tradition prized truth, beauty and the ‘the best which has been thought and said’. This has been shunted aside by a hair-trigger populism drawn to any cultural expression that scandalises progressive tastes. If people with graduate degrees hate it, today’s conservatives will love it.
Right-wing populists have a new cultural pin-up in Oliver Anthony, an ex-factory worker and singer-songwriter from Virginia. His track ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ has garnered 15 million views on YouTube in the space of a week and 1.5 million plays on Spotify in just five days. For each of those five days, it has also held the number one spot on iTunes.
The song is an ode to blue-collar Americans left to struggle by corrupt, self-serving politicians in Washington DC, which lies 100 miles north-east of Richmond. The anti-DC sentiment has made it an instant red-state anthem, helped along by endorsements from anti-liberal influencers like Matt Walsh and Republican country singer John Rich. Anthony has also attracted praise from Marjorie Taylor Greene, which no doubt brought in the crucial Rothschild space-laser awareness demographic.
Like Jason Aldean’s recent hit ‘Try That in a Small Town’, ‘North of Richmond’ has very online progressives inhaling through brown paper bags. Progressive media claimed ‘Small Town’ ‘openly calls for violence against Black people’ and sought to link Aldean to a 1927 lynching at the courthouse used as the backdrop for the music video. With Anthony’s record, the charges have ranged from hidden pro-Confederate messages to ‘fatphobia’, and those are among the more coherent critiques. Much of the coverage conveys a visceral but vague distaste for the song, as though journalists know they’re supposed to feel disdain but can’t quite articulate why.
The ‘why’ is probably that Anthony is such an obvious progressive villain: a Southern hick strumming tunes about the left-behind boonies on a resonator guitar; a red-beard redneck who opened a live performance on Sunday by quoting Psalm 37 (‘the Lord laughs at the wicked for He knows their day is coming’); an angry white man lashing out at social injustices other than racism and transphobia. Anthony cannot conceive of the sheer number of journalists who will have spent the past 72 hours searching every social media profile he’s ever had for the terms ‘Trump’, ‘stolen election’ and racial slurs.
Country music seems set to become the latest symptom of insurrectionist white supremacy for the political hypochondriacs of the American left. But the ick-driven overreaction to ‘North of Richmond’ is especially silly because the song is so very terrible. Here’s a sample:
I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere.
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare.
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.
Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground
’Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.
That is dreck. Doggerel. Objectively bad writing. It’s not snobbery to say so. The real snobbery comes from conservative urbanites and suburbanites who condescendingly assume that such lyrics are the best that could be expected from a poor country boy from Virginia. There is a rich tradition of Appalachian country, roots and bluegrass music but ‘North of Richmond’ has no place in it. To pretend otherwise insults that tradition and patronises Anthony.
‘North of Richmond’ is a squall of hoary nostalgia and pedestrian populism. Anthony regrets ‘livin’ in the new world/ with an old soul’, but old-soulism can so easily become young-fogeyism. Anthony evokes the dispossession of young American men, but he sees the answer not in political or economic change but in a mawkish yearning for a mythic past.
False-memory nostalgia is also at work in Anthony’s ‘Virginia’, which veers between love letter to the Commonwealth and hate letter to those he believes fail to give her her due. ‘Nobody singing songs ‘bout Virginia, but sweet Virginia’s always a-singin’ to me,’ he laments. It’s true: nobody sings songs about Virginia. Unless you count Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Joan Baez. Or the Foo Fighters, the Dave Matthews Band, and Tori Amos. Also: Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis. Anthony’s sepia-tinted glasses need a stronger prescription.
What is so frustrating about the banality of these songs is that it stands in contrast to others that can be found on YouTube, many seemingly filmed on a cameraphone in the woods of central Virginia, and which are more compelling and better showcase Anthony’s talent. ‘I’ve Got to Get Sober’ is a moody confessional about addiction and its cyclical grip while ‘Rich Man’s Gold’, with its refrain that ‘you weren’t born to just pay bills and die’, is a haunting Southern pastoral. These reflections are delivered in a desperate, devastating rasp, a country voice that keens like a DeWalt sidewinder tearing through mockernut hickory. It is a flinty-elegiac voice of pain and resentment, loss and self-pity. It’s a voice that owes itself a lot better than ‘North of Richmond’.
While Anthony idealises an earlier Virginia, he is embittered about America (‘this damn country’) and the ‘damn shame’ of ‘what the world’s gotten to/ for people like me and people like you’. In the past two decades or so, the American left and right have switched positions, with the left more likely to speak of the country with sunny, Reaganesque optimism and the right to grieve for America’s corrupted soul. That puts Anthony’s lyrics at odds with earlier iterations of the hayseed laureate.
In ‘The Fightin’ Side of Me’ (1970), Merle Haggard mithered about ‘squirrely’ hippies who ‘love our milk an’ honey’ but ‘preach about some other way of livin’’. Yet even as he warned, ‘When they’re runnin’ down my country, hoss/ they’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me,’ he added a proviso: ‘I don’t mind ‘em switchin’ sides and standin’ up for things they believe in.’
Haggard was a political enigma, a boxcar-raised petty criminal who inadvertently became the voice of Nixon’s America, a peacenik-bashing dope-denouncer who stuck up for the Dixie Chicks and defended Willie Nelson’s right to get stoned. His impulses were square but his instincts proletarian. Charlie Daniels went in the opposite direction, from playing Jimmy Carter’s inauguration to jingoistic reactionary, but he remained an American optimist. His 1980 single ‘In America’ reminded a divided country – and warned its foreign foes – that ‘we’ll all stick together/ and you can take that to the bank/ that’s the cowboys and the hippies/ and the rebels and the yanks.’
Wokeism has pushed the American right into an unthinking anti-wokeism
‘North of Richmond’, by contrast, is sour and gloomy, a dirge of the American experience. Anthony seems to have walked out of the pages of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and is unable to shake the fatalism. The most obvious rejoinder to that fatalism is his abrupt celebrity and the fortune it is likely to bring him, a very American story of the little guy who makes it. But conservatives have grown jaundiced about that story and the country it romanticises. They want to wallow in American decline and dysfunction and they especially want to seethe: at the Democrats, the woke, the universities, the corporations, the media. Nothing about ‘North of Richmond’ appeals to them as much as Rolling Stone’s breezy dismissal of the song. It is not necessary to discern the quality of a piece of music when liking it becomes a political act.
Conservatives have become imprisoned in the cultural confines of the progressive imagination. Metropolitan journalists dislike a trite country record? It’s a heartlands masterpiece. Liberal critics hyperventilate over a surprise box-office hit? It’s the right-wing Citizen Kane. The New York Times declaims an illiberal influencer? He is the authentic voice of the Republican party. Roger Scruton contended that ‘once we admit the judgement of beauty into our worldview, we admit along with it a distinction between good and bad taste’: his attempt to square discernment and the aesthetic hierarchy with ‘a democratic culture’. Right-populism has no interest in this tension, it simply allies itself to bad taste because it is low-status and thus in rebellion against the good taste of those whose views are high-status. Conservatives have abandoned throne and altar to take their place among the mob.
Wokeism has pushed the American right into an unthinking anti-wokeism, spurning truth, restraint and virtue for identity, grievance and score-settling. A conservatism that substitutes peevish anti-intellectualism for taste, wisdom and judgement is no conservatism at all.
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