By now you probably will have heard, or at least heard about, Rich Men North of Richmond. Oliver Anthony’s howling country protest song has appeared seemingly from nowhere to top the charts in the US this week, and inspire almost as many comment pieces as YouTube streams in the process. Framed as a hymn for the downtrodden working man in the vein of Woody Guthrie, it also smuggles in some rightwing talking points about overweight welfare recipients and taxation, prompting criticism from the left and whoops of support from conservatives.
The success of Rich Men, the first song to top the Billboard Top 100 by an artist who has never charted before, is remarkable enough on its own. Even more striking is that it’s the third ostensibly rightwing cultural US hit of the summer. Earlier this month, country star Jason Aldean also topped the Billboard charts with Try That in a Small Town, a paean to vigilanteism accompanied by a racially loaded (and since re-edited) music video. And over in Hollywood, Sound of Freedom, a child sex-trafficking drama accused of laundering QAnon conspiracies, has ridden high in the box office ever since its release in early July. (Sound of Freedom’s film-makers deny that the film is left- or rightwing, arguing that the issue of sex trafficking “spans the political spectrum”. UK viewers can see for themselves when it arrives in cinemas next week.)
