“I sold my soul”. Red beard, lumberjack build and guitar in hand, Oliver Anthony has become in a few days the face of a deep, working-class and forgotten America – and which suffers from it. On country chords, the lyrics of this American farmer against the social elite of Washington are a hit; the song has already been streamed more than 14 million times on YouTube, and topped the charts on Apple Music.
She even passed megastars Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen and Olivia Rodrigo to take the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart dated the week of August 26 and which will be released this Tuesday. According to the Billboard website, whose Hot 100 reflects performances from all records, streams and radio, all musical genres in the United States, this is the first time that an unknown songwriter and never appeared in any hit parade achieves such a feat.
Originally from the state of Virginia, the young man uploaded the video a few days ago, titled Rich Men North of Richmond, named after the capital of Virginia, located 175 km south of Washington.
Accompanied by bluegrass-style music, a branch of country, the lyrics denounce the harshness of the life of the working class and the most deprived in the face of the privileges of the rich and the elites of the first world power.
“I work overtime for a pittance”, he sings, before opposing “the people of the street who have nothing to eat” to the “obese who use the Welfare State as a of a cash cow”. He also mocks the liberal economic policies of tax cuts since the 1980s.
A passage is also moved by the increase in American suicides: “Young men find themselves six feet under because all this damn country does is keep putting them down”. Rich Men North of Richmond also highlights the fact that the country is politically divided between the rural, conservative south and center on the one hand, and the progressive east and west coast cities on the other.
The song ignited the internet last week, before rising to number one on the country chart on Apple Music’s iTunes platform, according to Billboard magazine, one of the first outlets to spot the phenomenon. In the aftermath, the song was dubbed the “blue-collar political anthem” in the United States, by the tabloid The New York Post.
Its competitor Rolling Stone headlined: “Far-right influencers have found their favorite country song.” In fact, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, supporter of Donald Trump and follower of conspiracy theories, judged on the social network X, (formerly Twitter) that Anthony’s piece was the one “Washington should hear”.
“It is the anthem of Americans long forgotten by our government. They are my people, kind, hard-working men and women who keep America going. I will fight for them every damn day, ”wrote the representative of the state of Georgia (south). The unexpected success of Anthony’s song thus crystallizes the tensions between big-city America and rural and frustrated America. This same feeling of abandonment had motivated the election of Donald Trump in 2016, who claimed to be the spokesperson for the forgotten during his campaign.
Simultaneously, the Democratic Senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy, estimated on the same platform that “progressives must also listen” to this song against “shitty wages and the power of the elites”.
