Micah Loewinger: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Micah 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.

[MUSIC - Oliver Anthony: Rich Men North of Richmond]

These rich men north of Richmond

Lord knows they all just wanna have total control

Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do

And they don't think you know, but I know that you do

'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end

'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Commentator 1: 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.

Commentator 2: Hey, good morning, George. It is the year's least likely number-one single, a complete unknown on solo guitar, with an us-versus-them message that's been generating a wide range of reaction.

Micah Loewinger: 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 Molanphy writes a column for Slate called Why Is This Song No. 1? Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Molanphy: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

[MUSIC - Oliver Anthony: Rich Men North of Richmond]

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

Micah Loewinger: Chris, there's so much going on here [chuckles].

Chris Molanphy: There really is.

Micah Loewinger: Can you break it down?

Chris Molanphy: 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. 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.

Micah Loewinger: Which a lot of people hear has coded racism, basically.

Chris Molanphy: 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.

At the very least, it is a muddled bill of particulars up to and including the Jeffrey Epstein-esque reference to minors on an island somewhere. This song is a mélange of culture war gripes all melded together. 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 angry voice, even if that voice is not entirely sure what it should be complaining about.

Micah Loewinger: 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?

Chris Molanphy: 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. 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.

[MUSIC - Jason Aldean: Try That in a Small Town]

'Round here we take care of our own

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

Micah Loewinger: That seemed like backlash to Black Lives Matter. Do you want to describe the music video associated with it, because I felt that gave a lot of context to the imagery that was surrounding the song.

Chris Molanphy: The video was shot in front of the Columbia Tennessee Courthouse, the same one where, infamously, the Black teen, Henry Choate, was lynched in 1927. Now, of course, Jason Aldean claims that that was not the intent of the video. Nonetheless, the dropping of the video by CMT, Country Music Television, prompted a full-scale campaign on the right 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 Rich Men North of Richmond appeared, it opened with nearly 150,000 downloads in its first week.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Chris Molanphy: Exactly.

Micah Loewinger: 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 Billboards Hot 100 Chart. Is that common?

Chris Molanphy: 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 Olive 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.

Micah Loewinger: Then, he was then featured in a question at the first GOP presidential debate.

Announcer: The number one song on the Billboard Chart is called Rich Men North of Richmond.

[applause]

It is by a singer from Farmville, Virginia named Oliver Anthony.

Chris Molanphy: By the time it appeared at the debate, the song was already number one. People hadn't fully decoded Oliver Anthony yet. Frankly, I'm not sure all these weeks later we still have fully decoded Oliver Anthony. 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."

Oliver Anthony: It's aggravating seeing people on conservative news try to identify with me like I'm one of them. It's aggravating seeing certain musicians and politicians act like we're buddies and act like we're fighting the same struggled here.

Micah Loewinger: Is it just me, or is this very confusing?

Chris Molanphy: It was confusing. I will say that when the song first came out right in that very first week, Anthony was claiming to be "dead center down the aisle on politics." 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. 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.

Micah Loewinger: How much of that do you think is somebody 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?

Chris Molanphy: When Oliver Anthony broke in mid-August, one of the conspiracy theories, particularly on the left, was that he was "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.

Micah Loewinger: 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. The streams, at least after the first week, seem to be increasing. It is an authentic hit. It would be uncharitable to ascribe too much importance to that initial right-wing push.

Chris Molanphy: 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's been a second week at number one. Folks are actually consuming this song. When you stream a record, it means that it's actually in the background of your regular life.

Micah Loewinger: This isn't the first time we've seen a song like this, one that storms the charts with a mixed or contested message that divides listeners, right?

Chris Molanphy: Absolutely. The song I analogized Rich Men North Of Richmond too, 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.

[MUSIC - Barry Sadler: 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 of the Green Beret

Chris Molanphy: 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. It even includes a vignette about a widow finding out that her Green Beret is not coming home to her. It's a pretty grim grizzly song. It sold millions of copies. It spent five weeks at number one on the Hot 100 in 1966.

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. 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. Similarly, Oliver Anthony's Rich Men 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. Doesn't even sound like Jason Aldean. It is its own strange curio of a record.

Micah Loewinger: 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 vintage folk in that way. 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?

Chris Molanphy: 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 ballad 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. 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 "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. 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 Rich Men 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 on adored.

Micah Loewinger: 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 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."

Chris Molanphy: 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, Eslabon Armado, and the fast-rising Latin trap king, Peso Pluma, a song called Ella Baila Sola going top five on the charts. This is regional Mexican music. It's got a waltz's 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. 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. A lot of stuff that would've 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.

Micah Loewinger: Chris, thank you very much.

Chris Molanphy: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Chris Molanphy 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.

[MUSIC - Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma: Ella Baila Sola]

 

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