10 conservative anthems better than Rich Men North of Richmond
You may not have heard of Oliver Anthony. But the one-time farmer from a small town in Virginia has become the darling of the Conservative right in the US after releasing an anti-establishment anthem that bashes greedy politicians, criticises high tax rates and slams overweight people for “milkin’ welfare”. The acoustic song is called Rich Men North of Richmond – in other words, the men in Washington DC – and it has become a viral smash hit.
The song has topped both the Apple Music and iTunes Country charts in the US and has had 14 million views on YouTube in the seven days since its release. At the weekend Anthony, who sports a voluminous copper beard, played his first public concert since the song went viral. So many fans were at his first ever gig in North Carolina that their cars “filled 25 acres”, Anthony wrote on social media.
The song is an angry, impassioned diatribe. “I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day/ Overtime hours for bullshit pay,” it starts. The rich men north of Richmond want to have total control and know what we think, he sings, while they avariciously tax people’s hard-earned dollars.
In an apparent reference to dead sex trafficker and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, Anthony sings, “I wish politicians would look out for miners/ And not just minors on an island somewhere.” He takes aim at “the obese milkin’ welfare”, saying that people’s taxes should not be used by people who are “5-foot-3 and… 300 pounds” to “pay for bags of fudge rounds”. You get the picture.
The song has been such a success that people have speculated that the young man from Farmville, Virginia, who used to live off-grid is some sort of plant by a wealthy or politically-motivated benefactor. Suspicions of “astroturfing”, a marketing strategy that creates fake grassroots campaigns to influence public opinion, were given credence when a Texan businessman called Jason Howerton – a man who helps “political influencers grow their social media footprint”, according to his LinkedIn profile – said on X (formerly Twitter) late last week that he financed the recording of Anthony’s record.
However Howerton took to X again this week to say: “To be clear: I’m not Oliver Anthony’s ‘manager’ or anything else. So, labels/campaigns/reporters, I promise continuing to call, email, & DM is a waste of time. I’m not giving you his number or otherwise connecting you.” Ahem, guilty. The plot thickens.
The track is the second politically-contentious country song to go viral in recent weeks. Last month US country star Jason Aldean released a video for Try That in a Small Town, a song about the declining sense of community in modern America. The video includes footage of shops being robbed by men in balaclavas. The message was clear: protest all you like in the city, but break the law in small town America at your peril. We’ll get you. Try That In A Small Town reached number two in the US Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and streams hit 11.7 million in a matter of days.
Writing in The Spectator about Anthony, former Mumford & Sons member Winston Marshall said that “the counterculture has a fresh face – and it wears a shaggy red beard”. Marshall argued that considered critical coverage of Anthony’s song should draw a line from the singer back to Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, “Steinbeck and Twain”.
I respectfully disagree. The song’s message may have made millions of Americans sit up and take note, but Anthony sounds like a bargain basement Rag’n’Bone Man and the track has little artistic merit.
That being said, there are plenty of songs with “conservative” themes that have stood the test of time (which Anthony’s song won’t). By conservative themes I mean songs that advocate low taxes, law and order, monogamy, self-sufficiency and family values. You don’t even need to be situated on the political right to appreciate them. Once you’ve seen the songs, you might appreciate why Rich Men North of Richmond is not on the list.
1. Taxman, by The Beatles
Written by George Harrison in 1966, Taxman attacked the nineteen-shillings-and-sixpence-in-the-pound top rate of income tax of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. The regime’s supertax meant that the high-earning Beatles were liable to a 95 per cent rate, which explained the lyric “There’s one for you, 19 for me.” The song’s simplicity – a bass riff and off-beat guitar chords – belied a stinging message. “Yeah I’m the taxman/ And you’re working for no one but me,” sang Harrison. In order to achieve political balance and not be accused of Labour-bashing by left-wing fans, The Beatles included a mention of Conservative leader Ted Heath (“Ah, ah, Mr Heath”) in the penultimate verse. All politicians are the same, was the message. Clever.
2. Freedom, by Wham!
A monogamy anthem. For all the pop jauntiness of this 1984 song, the track saw the protagonist – singer George Michael – extolling the virtues of committed coupledom. “Every day I hear a different story/ People say that you’re no good for me/ ‘Saw your lover with another and she’s making a fool of you,’” sang Michael. “I don’t want your freedom…/ Part time love just brings me down.” But despite his pain, Michael can’t leave her. He’s like “a prisoner who has his own key” and he always forgives her (“just this once, twice, forever”). It’s a heart-breaking song, really. The melody of Freedom’s chorus was used by Michael as the funerial church organ introduction to his later solo single, Faith.
3. Ain’t It Fun, by Paramore
Written by Paramore singer Hayley Williams as a letter to herself when she moved from Nashville to Los Angeles, this 2013 song can be seen as something of an anti-snowflake anthem. The track, which won a Grammy in 2015 for Best Rock Song, is about growing up and realising that the world doesn’t revolve around yourself any more. “You’re not the big fish in the pond no more…/ So what are you going to do when the world don’t orbit around you?” Williams sings.
It’s easy to ignore trouble when you’re living in a bubble, she adds, before telling listeners (and herself): “Don’t go crying to your mama ’cause you’re on your own in the real world”. This last line then becomes the song’s much-repeated call-and-response coda. Vast festival crowds around the world have been filmed hollering the line repeatedly at the top of their lungs as this towering hymn to self-sufficiency builds and builds. It beats “Day-Oh”, I suppose.
4. Chapel of Love, The Dixie Cups
“Goin’ to the chapel/ And we’re gonna get married,” went this classic by The Dixie Cups from 1964. “Gee, I love you,” it continued, just in case the song’s wholesome message was lost on listeners. Written by real life couple Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich (with a songwriting credit also going to Phil Spector, who was slated to produce an early version), the song spent three weeks at the top of the American charts and sold over a million copies. Bette Midler recorded a version in 1972 (produced by Barry Manilow), the Beach Boys followed suit four years later and Elton John did a version for the soundtrack of Four Weddings and a Funeral in the mid-Nineties. Barry, Greenwich and Spector teamed up again a few years later to co-write River Deep – Mountain High.
5. I Fought The Law, by The Bobby Fuller Four/The Clash
Written in 1958 by Sonny Curtis of the Crickets, this rebel song was covered by The Bobby Fuller Four in 1965 and The Clash in 1979. The British punk band’s version is interesting: for all the group’s anti-establishment credentials, the song was ultimately about the inevitability of the authorities crushing dissent. It’s therefore arguably a pro-law and order song. “I fought the law/ And the law won.” Thinking about robbing people with a six-gun? Don’t. You’ll fight the law and – guess what? – the law will win. Joe Strummer amped up the heartache after being separated from his “baby” due to being nabbed and presumably banged up in the slammer, giving the song a romantic underdog feel. Still, there’s only one winner in this track.
6. Baba O’Riley, by The Who
Its name is often mistaken as Teenage Wasteland, thereby leading some people to think it’s a song about being a teenager and getting wasted. But The Who’s fantastic 1971 song Baba O’Riley was actually an anti-teenage song penned by Pete Townshend after seeing thousands of monged-out youths and piles of litter at 1969’s Woodstock and Isle of Wight festivals. He said that the song was inspired by “the absolute desolation of teenagers at Woodstock, where audience members were strung out on acid and 20 people had brain damage. The irony was that some listeners took the song to be a teenage celebration.” Rarely has being straight-laced sounded so thrilling.
7. Bodies, by Sex Pistols
A surprising inclusion, perhaps, but Bodies was a graphic 1977 Sex Pistols song that was searingly anti-abortion and pro-life. “She was a girl from Birmingham/ She just had an abortion…/ She was an animal/ She was a bloody disgrace,” sneered singer Johnny Rotten (AKA John Lydon). The lyrics are unflinching and still hard to listen to nearly 50 years on. Lydon said in a 2007 interview with Spin magazine that “I don’t think there’s a clearer song about the pain of abortion”.
8. Beat It, by Michael Jackson
Jackson’s 1982 classic from the Thriller album focused on avoiding violence by walking away from a fight. “Don’t wanna see no blood/ Don’t be a macho man,” he sang. It doesn’t matter who’s in the right, was the message, just “beat it”. The video featured genuine members of rival Los Angeles gangs, Crips and Bloods. It started with them fighting and ended with them dancing, having seen the error of their ways. See what he did there? Soon after its release the song was included in the National Highway Safety Commission’s anti-drink driving campaign in the US. President Ronald Reagan presented the singer with an award at the White House following the campaign. Jackson was, Reagan said, “proof of what a person can accomplish through a lifestyle free of alcohol or drug abuse”. The President added: “If Americans follow his example, then we can face up to the problem of drinking and driving, and we can, in Michael’s words, ‘Beat it.’”
9. Sweet Home Alabama, by Lynyrd Skynyrd
The Florida rockers wrote this song in 1973 as a riposte to Neil Young’s perceived bigotry on his tracks Southern Man and Alabama, in which the Canadian appeared to blame all of the American South for slavery and generally criticised the region (“Oh Alabama, banjos playing through the broken glass”). As Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant said at the time, “We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one of two.” The South is great, in other words. The lyrics to Sweet Home Alabama namecheck Young and tell him in that “a Southern man don’t need him around anyhow”. Young himself later admitted that Alabama “richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great song. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending.”
10. Angry Young Man, by Billy Joel
A polite-ish rebuke of idealistic lefties by Billy Joel, this 1976 song was all about growing out of your rebellious phase gracefully. “There’s a place in the world for the angry young man/ With his working class ties and his radical plans,” sung Joel. Such people’s intentions are good and they’re right to be proud of their scars and the battles they’ve – pointedly – “lost”, he sang. But Joel, then in his late twenties, had “passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage” and had learnt that “just surviving was a noble fight”. He once believed in causes, and had his “pointless point of view”. But he’d learned that life went on no matter who was wrong or right. Angry young men may be fair and true, but they’re also “boring as hell”. The song is essentially saying, “Get over yourself, idealists.”