(New York) An American country singer, still completely unknown 15 days ago and today number one in music sales in the United States, on Friday rejected any political recovery after elected officials and Republican presidential candidates from 2024 tried to dub it.
With his piece of bluegrass Rich Men North of Richmond – named after the capital city of Virginia 175 miles south of Washington – 30-something farmhand Oliver Anthony beat megastars Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen and Olivia Rodrigo this week in taking the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Unheard of for a musician who has never appeared in any music charts.
Released on August 11 on YouTube with its clip, the song, sold, streamed, downloaded, and seen on the internet more than 30 million times, has become the anthem of rural people in the United States who feel impoverished in the conservative south and center, against the supposedly wealthy urban progressives of the east and west coasts.
The success is such that Rich Men North of Richmond opened, on Wednesday on Fox News, the debate between eight Republican candidates (in the absence of Donald Trump) in the Conservative Party primaries for the 2024 presidential election.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis saw it as a musical work committed against the economic policy of Democratic President Joe Biden.
Many elected officials and commentators on the right and far right even consider it “the political anthem of blue-collar workers” and “Americans forgotten in government”.
But Oliver Anthony, a red-haired guy with a full beard, does not like these recovery attempts.
“It’s infuriating to see people in the conservative media trying to identify with me as one of their own,” he protested in a ten-minute video posted to YouTube.
“It’s maddening to see some musicians and politicians act like we’re buddies, like we’re fighting the same battles,” he said.
His anti-elite song, which denounces inflation, taxes, long working hours for poverty wages but also social benefits, “has nothing to do with Joe Biden, it goes way beyond Joe Biden”.
The singer claims, sometimes on the verge of tears, “to hate that [his] song is used as a political weapon”.
“The right tries to brand me as one of them and the left tries to discredit me, in retaliation I imagine. This shit needs to stop,” warns the one who claimed to be “right in the middle” of Americans’ socio-economic concerns.