While I may not be old enough to have “been there” when Bob Dylan unpacked his guitar and turned the world of politically minded music around[1], as a young girl I watched the 1988 Free Nelson Mandela Tribute concert on TV in my parent’s living room. I remember it for one gig only – Tracy Chapman’s. I was instantly mesmerised: a black tomboy with nothing on her but an acoustic guitar, a manly voice, and a simple outfit consisting of a grey turtleneck and a pair of black jeans, she held the attention of an audience of 600 million people on the TV sets – plus the 13 000 at London’s Wembley Stadium – by singing a simple song: Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution. The purity, simplicity, and lack of even the faintest hint of affectation was the point. It was as though the audience, before they even knew it themselves, pined for a little genuineness, and here it was: a young girl black girl in a low-key outfit singing a simple folk song, accompanying herself on guitar.[2] In fact, in that magic moment, Chapman supplied to a demand for purity held in the social unconscious, and with it, introduced a new aesthetic shift in pop culture. After the years of Thatcherite glitzy (and excellent) pop music with Wham!, Kajagoogoo, Culture Club, DuranDuran, Spandau Ballet or Kim Wilde, Chapman’s Mandela gig single-handedly marked a new beginning, with the late eighties now remembered as the first to fetishise authenticity. Even Madonna briefly switched to black-and-white video aesthetics, a deliberately unkempt “out-of-the-water”-look and acoustic guitars before she also got bored of that and asked Jean-Paul Gaultier to design the not so-natural stage look for her “Blond Ambition”- world tour in 1990.
The rest of Tracy Chapman’s career is history: her debut album became what is known in the music world as a “commercial success”. It sold over 20 million times, got her platinum records and touring forever. This was noteworthy because everybody loved her – art critics, The Village, and teenagers in Hanoi or Moscow. Only Jim Kerr’s Simple Minds were as unifying as Chapman, probably, with both raving reviews in The Wire and Smash Hits. Chapman was the good conscience of the pop world. Even Bono approved. Being cheered on by everyone from the high art world to Desmond Tutu ironically neutralized her status as a political, “socially conscious” singer. Her legacy is that of a one hit wonder, known for “Fast Car”, a song covered by high school bands and featured in love song compilation CDs all over the world.
Still, I loved her record and dedicatedly listened to it in the summer of 1989 when I was 13, though it always made me a little sad. I could not quite get the joy out of the following lines:
While they're standing in the welfare lines
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sitting around waiting for a promotion
At the same time, it was clear that my very left-wing parents implicitly demanded a justification from me for listening to American and British pop records, and here it was. My father always had great sympathies for Nelson Mandela – he would “boycott” South African tangy orange marmalade, although it was his favourite – so Tracy Chapman’s music was outright welcomed in our house. And “poor people are gonna rise up to get their share” was always something my mother would include in her political commentary anyway. No one was being rubbed the wrong way.
35 years and hundreds of chart-storming folk singers with “commercial success” later, the world has changed. The Left has become fascist, the Right has become the voice of dissent, and pop music, like art always a left-liberal form of entertainment, has been commercialised to a point at which the writing, arrangement and production complies to the demands of algorithms. When Kanye West took up Bob Dylan’s legacy to become the most overrated musician and producer in the history of pop, its fate was sealed: songs became mid, aesthetics became prefab, and nothing was fun anymore. The anti-wokies didn’t care if we had more fun than the wokies. Everything became stylised, any sign of life in a new album killed. “Optics”, again, became everything, and then there was Social Media that people spent more time with than meticulously shopping for or listening to records.
In this environment, a new sensation popped up its red-bearded head very recently. A young man who calls himself Oliver Anthony and who wasn’t known to anyone beyond his circle of friends and family in Farmville (yes), Virginia, until two weeks ago, has released a video that went viral within days. Like Chapman before him, he only has a guitar and his full-bodied voice to sport, but he does so with so much conviction and – let’s just repeat it – purity and simplicity that he held the masses captive:
Leading the iTunes and Apple Music charts, his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” was viewed over a 100 million times, with the help of Joe Rogan or David Sacks marketing it in their podcasts. Unlike Chapman before him, he wasn’t filmed while pushed to a stage to fill in for Stevie Wonder at a massive tribute concert but was filmed standing alone (with his dogs) in a forest among green trees – or at least against a very green background that one associates with “nature”. This is good and almost clever – remember that Lady Gaga or Beyoncé have gone the way of the dodo. Contemporary pop of the past 20 years made a custom out of artificiality pushed to extremes, so that a return to simple form was bound to become fashionable – a true desideratum – again. This has a lot to do with the liberal establishment’s disdain for not only workers as people, but the life they live, the everyday things they enjoy. Joy itself is no longer on the pop culture menu, or rather, not the kind of joy that brings solace after a hard-working day. This is not primarily about missing working class representation in the arts – though that, too. Sam Smith for example is so far removed from working class aesthetics that he simply became a nuisance – and a joke, leading his self-important musical and fashion style ad absurdum.
Oliver Anthony is a star now. He should enjoy his 15-minute fame in every possible way. His hit song is well-written and not unlike the chord sequence and melody line in Chapman’s initial hit. The lyrics summarise today’s dissidence in the best possible way – including the line against welfare. The boy has “hit a nerve”, as they say, and one only wonders why not more singer-songwriters like him, or comedians, satirists, artists, and commentators have popped up on our Social Media feeds repeatedly in the last three or four years. After all, the lyrics are not that artistic and speak a plain language:
It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to/ For people like me and people like you Wish I could just wake up and it not be true /But it is, oh, it is.
Anyone will agree. The chorus, however, is slightly more sophisticated:
Livin' in the new world / With an old soul /These rich men north of Richmond / Lord knows they all just wanna have total control /Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do / And they don't think you know, but I know that you do / 'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end /'Cause of rich men north of Richmond.
They are classic lyrics that Phil Ochs or Gil Scott-Heron could have written in the 60s or 70s, the latter with a Fender Rhodes rather than a steel string guitar and perhaps a more soulful tune. Nothing is new about Oliver Anthony’s song, and that is the wonderful thing about it. Its timeless and universal quality make it an antidote to the very customer-specific aesthetic of a Lizzo video. Social division seems to have been upended just by listening to Anthony’s song. It has the power to end the era of University Ideology and the false idea that there is anything good about it. Unlike some “dissident rap”, it does not accuse the Covidians and the Climate believers for being “manipulated”, but points to the Big Man and his clique in Washington DC. It is a song of unification, and yet fully in the spirit of Tucker Carlson. Is it an anthem for the revolution from below? Hell yeah, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. The meaning of this song, despite its reconciliatory and folksy mood, lies in its true belligerence to the enemies of freedom and democracy. People realise that so much more is at stake today than making high and low art critics agree on one’s musical presentation. In that sense, Oliver Anthony, more than Tracy Chapman in her time, is the political, the real protest singer. The denunciation of the song as a “starter kit for the conspiracy curious” (Slate), as “right-wing” and “racist”, “xenophobic”, “antisemitic”, “trans- and fatphobic” (have I forgotten anything?) is simply proof that “Rich Men North of Richmond” lives up to its name: a protest song in the here and now, a class-conscious call to end elite domination. By contrast, “Talkin’ ‘bout a revolution”, a strange intruder into the Thatcherite and neoliberal “society of fun”, was bound to become emptied of its spirit. But then again, its spirit was not as pertinent, not as immediate to most people’s lives in the West. Chapman’s song did not speak to Westerners in 1988.
In 2023, by contrast, the protest song, a lyrical form around since time immemorial, has never been as apt as an artistic form as it is today. “Rich men North of Richmond” makes the concept of “protest song” and the thing become one in a Hegelian sense.
Of course, Anthony will not turn down 8 million US $-deals forever. And neither should he. If he is clever, he will go the way of the Chapman and still be able to fill mid-size venues in 35 years. I wish him all the “commercial success” he can have.
[1] I famously dislike Bob Dylan. With him, folk music became diversified to include art- and talentless non-singers and dimwitted “lyricists” (and later literature Nobel prize winners, to mark the date the Stockholm Academy has lost all credibility) – in other words, it turned pop.
Sorry you missed Dylan’s time, there were decades - before the commodification - when the music was positively 100 on the Richter scale. He showed us kiddies the grownups were indeed insane, (and deadly) just as we suspected, and watching the baffled and clueless press was a lesson for a lifetime.
“Is it an anthem for the revolution from below? Hell yeah, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. The meaning of this song, despite its reconciliatory and folksy mood, lies in its true belligerence to the enemies of freedom and democracy. “
This is great! People all over the world are disgusted with political leaders consistently undermining freedom, prosperity, and opportunity. The pathway to change first involves understanding where the real problem lies. The blame belongs to the political class fraternity, that closed social club that gains wealth and power on the backs of hard-working people. It is through them that creeping totalitarianism is gaining ground in free societies.