sticking it to the man
"rich men north of richmond" and the problem of populist kitsch
On August 8th, 2023, RadioWV—a YouTube channel which highlights unsigned Americana and country artists from Appalachia—uploaded a video with the title “Oliver Anthony - Rich Men North Of Richmond,” showing a man with a closely-cropped haircut and a flaming red beard standing in the forest, strumming a resonator guitar as he begins to sing about how “I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay.” The song, which deplores the plight of working Americans while bemoaning high taxes and taking shots at elite politicians—Washington, D.C. is about 95 miles north of Richmond—was an instant hit. Within just three days, the YouTube video of Anthony singing “Rich Men” had already garnered close to 5 million views, and Anthony became just the sixth solo artist ever to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. (At the time of writing, Anthony’s song has more than 58 million streams on Spotify.)
This overnight success was due in large part to the song’s virality on social media, particularly in right-wing circles—far-right U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called it “the anthem of the forgotten Americans who truly support this nation and unfortunately the world with their hard earned tax dollars and incredibly hard work,” while conservative commentator and noted transphobic extremist Matt Walsh applauded the song for being “raw and authentic.” Alt-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec wrote that he couldn’t remember “the last time a new song hit me like this,” and Kari Lake, the far-right GOP nominee for Governor of Arizona in the 2022 election, praised it as “the anthem of this moment in American history.”
Unsurprisingly, the song’s popularity among conservatives has caused considerable controversy, which has only been exacerbated by lyrical themes that struck many listeners as fundamentally right-wing—in addition to complaining about taxation, the second verse of “Rich Men” criticizes “the obese milkin’ welfare” and declares that “if you’re five-foot-three and you’re three-hundred pounds, taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds.” Moreover, many have claimed that the song’s mention of politicians’ affinity for “minors on an island somewhere” carries disturbing echoes of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
This controversy is due in part to the fact that the clip of Anthony singing in the woods went viral on social media not long after the outcry over country star Jason Aldean’s single “Try That in a Small Town,” whose gun-toting law-and-order lyrics echo popular right-wing themes and whose music video was filmed at a Tennessee courthouse where an 18-year-old Black man was lynched in 1927. Both songs’ skyrocketing chart rankings and popularity among conservatives have led many observers to try and locate “Rich Men North of Richmond” within a broader trend of right-wing pop culture phenomena—one article in Variety called Anthony’s song “‘Try That in a Small Town,’ but with a literally friendlier face,” while another analysis in USA Today drew parallels between “Rich Men” and The Sound of Freedom, a controversial film about child trafficking that has become a massive hit among QAnon followers.
Still, some liberals and even leftists have praised the song for its articulation of the working class’ plight—Democratic Connecticut senator Chris Murphy shared the song on Twitter, saying that “progressives should listen” to it because it addresses “the soullessness of work, shit wages and the power of the elites,” and one analysis in The Nation argued that the left should avoid “throwing the baby out with the bathwater just because some of the lyrics assign misplaced blame.”
For his part, Anthony himself has shied away from being pinned down by any political label—on August 25, he uploaded a 10-minute video to YouTube in which he lambasted conservative politicians who had “weaponized” his song and expressed bemusement at its invocation by Republican presidential candidates on the Fox News debate stage, commenting that “I wrote that song about those people.” That same day, he tweeted that “I. Don't. Support. Either. Side. Politically. Not the left, not the right. Im about supporting people and restoring local communities.”
So what ought we to make of a song like “Rich Men North of Richmond?” Where should we locate it on the political spectrum? Is it possible to locate its politics anywhere at all? Does the song really even have a coherent politics to begin with?
The answer to all of these questions is: it depends. Beyond the political positions that we usually associate with the video’s superficial aesthetics—a white man with a large beard, standing in the middle of the woods in a sweat-stained farm T-shirt and accompanying his mournful country twang with a fingerpicked guitar—there is much about “Rich Men North of Richmond” that undoubtedly reads as the simple reiteration of textbook conservative talking points. Complaints about the working man’s hard-earned money being “taxed to no end” have been a staple of Republican campaigns for more than half a century, and there’s little doubt that Ronald Reagan’s ghost was smiling up at us from his fiery resting place when he first heard Anthony’s quip about “the obese milkin’ welfare.” The repudiation of politicians who “just wanna have total control, wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do” sounds eerily reminiscent of right-wing fearmongering about the woke mob and its Big Brother-esque assault on free speech and independent thought. And it’s difficult to imagine a more succinct encapsulation of the reactionary ethos than the chorus’ lament about the tribulations of “livin’ in the new world with an old soul”—a line which seems to be practically begging for a return to the good ol’ days (perhaps even for an orange-complexioned messiah who can Make America Great Again).
For obvious reasons, all of the above makes it difficult to take seriously the claims of those who have tried to argue that “Rich Men” is somehow an authentic expression of left-wing class politics simply because it deals (admittedly quite poignantly) with themes of working-class alienation and disenfranchisement. Still, it strikes me as somewhat of a mistake to try and frame the song, as many have done, as unabashedly right-wing.
In fact, it seems to me that we should take Anthony at his word when he says that he had no intention of writing a partisan anthem for either side of the political spectrum. As far as I can tell, the politics of “Rich Men North of Richmond” represent neither the working-class solidarity of the left nor the reactionary cultural chauvinism of the right, but something else altogether—a widely-held but nevertheless politically incoherent brand of anti-establishment politics, one whose diagnosis of the country’s woes offers little apart from an amorphous sense of populist antipathy toward the “elites”. Such a politics actively rejects any attempt to locate it on the left or the right as a cynical effort to divide “the people” amongst themselves and prevent them from uniting against their common enemy. The problem with this particular brand of populism without labels is that in its pursuit of an anti-establishment ethos that transcends partisan politics, it invariably leaves itself vulnerable to co-optation by right-wing forces—as the right’s overwhelming embrace of Anthony’s song so clearly demonstrates.
Perhaps the quasi-populist politics espoused by “Rich Men North of Richmond” can be best understood through the lens of kitsch, a term which American political scientist Murray Edelman defines in his 1995 book From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions as “art that sentimentalizes everyday experiences, or that appeals to beliefs and emotions encouraging vanity, prejudices, or unjustified fears and dubious successes.” Kitsch, Edelman writes, “provides stereotypical models for characters who are admired and those who are disdained. It shapes notions of beauty and ugliness, courage and cowardice, merit and incompetence, honor and shame, and other virtues and vices…To review its social functions is to recognize that it plays a major role in politics.”
The education scholar Catherine A. Lugg echoes this view in her 1999 book Kitsch: From Education to Public Policy, in which she argues that kitsch constitutes “a form of cultural anesthesia” whose producers intentionally exploit the cultural biases of a given audience, “engaging the emotions and deliberately ignoring the intellect.” Kitsch, according to Lugg, is characterized first and foremost by being simple and predictable. In kitsch, she writes, “there are no aesthetic leaps and very few, if any, surprises.” This adherence to established formulas, she argues, makes kitsch incredibly useful for politics by enabling it to “simultaneously provide psychological comfort and reinforce a host of national mythologies.”
Lugg expands on her analysis of kitsch’s political dimensions by introducing the idea of “political Kitsch,” which she defines as “a type of propaganda that incorporates familiar and easily understood art forms (Kitsch) to shape the direction of public policy” by relying on “easily invoked cultural symbols to address complex political dilemmas and limit analysis.” It’s important to note that while most definitions of kitsch place its lowbrow sensibilities and mass-produced character in explicit opposition to capital-A Art, Lugg’s concept of political kitsch holds that even “genuine art forms,” which may not necessarily be ‘kitsch’ in and of themselves, can still be “colonized to function as political Kitsch.” She cites as an example the use of Fleetwood Mac’s song “Don’t Stop” by Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, and notes that “rock music seems particularly vulnerable to political Kitsch.”1
This “colonization” is exactly what seems to have happened with “Rich Men North of Richmond.” There’s little doubt in my mind that Anthony wrote this song to express real feelings of hurt and anguish, with the intention of creating a piece of genuine art rather than mere propaganda. And yet, by relying on tired tropes and convenient scapegoats—what Catherine Lugg might call “easily invoked cultural symbols”—to fill the gap created by the song’s fundamentally hollow politics, he made it all but inevitable that “Rich Men” would be taken up as an anthem of the right. After all, channeling the blame for the problems of working people toward any number of bogeymen, whether they be immigrants or “welfare queens” or a shadowy cabal of Satanic (((elites))), is among the defining features of the right-wing MO.
This is highlighted with particular clarity by the glaring disconnect between the song’s two verses. The first, which begins with the line “I’ve been selling my soul, working all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay,” is a heartfelt and deeply poignant lament about blue-collar despair and alienation. This is what people are referring to when they describe “Rich Men” as a new anthem of working-class discontent, but any shred of class consciousness in the song stops here. The second verse, in which Anthony blames Fudge Rounds for homelessness and nods in the direction of conspiracy theories tying politicians to child sex trafficking, is a disjointed hodgepodge of right-wing talking points that have little tying them together apart from a steadfast refusal to accurately diagnose the actual root causes of the very real problems that Anthony has so rightly identified. Whatever genuinely meaningful message exists in the song’s first verse is thoroughly eclipsed, if not altogether erased, by the second verse’s incoherent amalgamation of conservative grievances.
Importantly, one of the defining characteristics of political kitsch as conceptualized by Lugg is its utter lack of any remotely subversive quality. Kitsch, she writes, “neither challenges nor subverts the larger social order because it must pacify, not provoke. The political status quo must be legitimated and upheld as morally superior.” On its surface, this seems to exclude “Rich Men North of Richmond” by definition—after all, the song is all about morally condemning the Washington establishment; its central thesis is that politicians are nothing but a bunch of corrupt, lying crooks. “Rich Men” went viral not because of its catchiness, but because of what Anthony’s fans perceive to be its unflinching honesty in speaking truth to power.
But is there anything really all that subversive about the song’s message in the first place? Complaining about how out-of-touch elite politicians are is arguably one of the most overused tropes in American politics—just think about how many campaign ads feature candidates walking through a cornfield or down a small-town Main Street with their sleeves rolled up while they repeat some variation on the same general theme of “I’m running for XXX because I’m tired of career politicians in Washington putting the interests of their big-money donors and corporate cronies ahead of hardworking Americans.” These days, regardless of party affiliation, it’s almost a prerequisite for anyone seeking elected office—anyone seeking to themselves become a rich man north of Richmond—to run on some rhetorical combination of fighting corruption, not being a “traditional” politician, and representing the voice of the working man. (Of course, if you’re running on the GOP line, it can’t hurt to throw in a sprinkle of poor-shaming or QAnon conspiracism for good measure.)
If kitsch is defined by its predictable invocation of oft-repeated tropes and stale cultural symbols to exploit its audience’s prejudices and reinforce already-dominant political narratives, then invoking these same tropes and symbols in a song that is immediately claimed as an anthem by the right must surely be an example of political kitsch at its finest. “Rich Men North of Richmond” is a case study in what we might call populist kitsch—art which claims to give voice to the woes and frustrations of the common man while simultaneously eschewing any political commitment beyond a nebulous and rather empty anti-establishment ethos.
The trouble is that the real causes of working-class alienation—exploitation by capitalist overlords and a system of government that is designed to prop up the interests of those same overlords—are themselves inexorably political. It’s not actually possible to meaningfully or accurately engage with these themes, whether in art or in any other avenue of expression, without taking an anti-capitalist political stance, and any attempt to do so invariably lends itself to co-optation and weaponization by the very establishment that it seeks to critique. In his reaction to his song’s surprise appearance on the Republican debate stage, Anthony seemed surprised that career politicians were falling over themselves to claim it as an expression of their own values. In fact, this was all but inevitable. The problem with populist kitsch—like with the hollow populism that underpins it—is that anyone, regardless of their actual interests or agenda, is able to claim it and use it to cloak themselves in a veneer of subversiveness, even as they actively work to reinforce the same systems that are keeping the working class down.
On August 20th, twelve days after “Rich Men North of Richmond” was first uploaded to YouTube, legendary English singer and activist Billy Bragg released a response to Anthony, in which he implored workers in Anthony’s situation to “join a union” and “fight for better pay.” The central thesis of Bragg’s song is best summed up by its chorus:
You’ll see where the problem really lies when the union comes around:
Rich men earning north of a million wanna keep the working folk down.
At the time of writing, the YouTube video for “Rich Men Earning North of a Million” has fewer than 300,000 views, compared to more than 63 million and counting for “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Bragg’s vocals, though far from weak, lack the raw pathos and brain-scratching twang of Anthony’s performance, and his lyrics are perhaps a bit too on-the-nose to be taken seriously by most listeners outside of activist circles. Still, “Rich Men Earning North of a Million” succeeds in one crucial area where “Rich Men North of Richmond” woefully fails. Unlike Anthony’s viral hit, Bragg’s response points the finger for the problems of the working class, not at immigrants or welfare queens or ill-defined “elites”, but at those who are actually responsible—the capitalist class whose greed and exploitation are enabled by the politicians in Washington.
What’s more, while the populist kitsch represented by “Rich Men North of Richmond” tends to engender a particularly nefarious form of political passivity that lends itself all too well to co-optation by the status quo, “Rich Men Earning North of a Million” rightfully points out that “nothing’s gonna change if all you do is wish you could wake up and it not be true.” In its penultimate verse, Bragg’s song raises a crucial question that Anthony’s, with its misdirected anger and incoherent politics, never even comes close to asking:
Are you gonna take action now you’ve sung your damn song?
As noted above, Lugg’s book was published in 1999. Had it been written a few years later, it is difficult to imagine that she would not have cited as a textbook example of political kitsch the uniquely odious brand of beer-swilling, flag-waving, jingoistic drivel that came to dominate the country music genre in the aftermath of 9/11.
culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer, essayist, and cultural critic Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox:
This was such a good and informative read thank you