Proceed With Caution
An unknown singer blows up the charts but what do we really know about him?
Over the weekend a guy no one had heard of before named Oliver Anthony blew up on social media with a song titled “Rich Men North Of Richmond“. The video came out six days ago and has over 11 million views. I assume you have heard the song so I won’t bother embedding it. He has a Twitter account that is just a few days old. He really is an unknown but suddenly this guy is the latest right-wing villain for the media and the latest /ourguy/ hero for the right.
The song isn’t really my cup of tea musically and what he is saying is basically what lots of us have been saying for years. Mostly I am advising caution. My Spidey sense is tingling off the charts.
Maybe this guy is /ourguy/, and I hope he is, but maybe he is not. A lot of that sort of working class populism misses the underlying issues, like race and the who is actually pulling the strings. His latest video about moving forward is pretty vague and talks about how bad hate is. What should your emotions be toward people that are trying to destroy a nation and a way of life? Cautious optimism?
Nothing about this feels organic. How did a video get that much traction that fast? He made some other videos over the last few years but not many and I assume the vast majority of the views those videos have currently came in the last week.
We have been down this road before. People on the right are always looking for a heroic savior and over and over again those people have been let down, betrayed and disappointed but it doesn’t stop them for turning right back around and looking for the next one. Hell, people have been trying to find the next Reagan since the 1980s even though Reagan wasn’t all that great of a President.
Let’s see what this guy does when he starts to get those checks rolling in from his music and from Youtube and after They have some time to start working on him. Principled populism evaporates pretty quickly when you buy the new dually pick-up truck. What do we really know about this guy, what he believes on the big questions, what his plans are going forward? We don’t know anything really and that is reason enough to tread carefully.
Maybe I am being overly cynical but there is plenty of precedent to warrant caution and cynicism. More critically, we all need to stop looking for some national figure to ride to the rescue, whether it is Trump or Oliver Anthony. No one is coming to save us, we need to be about the business and hard working of looking out for ourselves.
Valid points Arthur. Have you read his 'how he made it' story? He apparently was a drunk down on his luck, got on his knees, "gave himself over to the L*rd" and said that if his album took off, he'd quit the sauce... a wee too pat, hence why when everyone started going batshit for this guy, I, like you have been watching and waiting