Most of us regard art as mere decoration.
We don’t admit that, of course, especially not among the beautiful people we may jostle against in our leisure hours.
Every now and then, however, something happens to remind us that art can be a good deal more than decoration.
It can move the hearts and minds of millions of people.
It can vibrate to and expand upon the melody of the Zeitgeist.
A case in point is a simple song by a young Virginia man popularly known as Oliver Anthony.
The song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” has taken the internet by storm.
Released just last week, it has been uploaded to every major streaming service and is, as I write this, the No. 1 song in the country on iTunes.
Two other songs by Mr. Anthony are also in the top 10.
The power of his rendition lies partly in its unrehearsed simplicity and patent sincerity.
Mr. Anthony is outside in a woodsy clearing, playing a guitar, accompanied by three well-behaved dogs.
It couldn’t be more straightforward.
What catapulted the song and the songster to fame, however, was its burden.
Several observers have called “Rich Men North of Richmond” a sort of anthem for a movement.
The movement is still messy and inchoate, but flashpoints such as Mr. Anthony’s song help give it definition.
Rolling Stone, which started life as a make-believe anti-establishment magazine for make-believe rebels of the coddled class, has long since shed its pseudo-counter-cultural aura and emerged as just another self-indulgent PR machine for the spirit of corporate hegemony.
But this is completely obtuse.
Mr. Anthony’s song is taking the country by storm not because it’s “right wing” but because it has cut clean through such lazy, artificial, and unilluminating labels.
In part, it’s a blue-collar, working man’s lament.
“I’ve been selling my soul,” Mr. Anthony cries, “Working all day/Overtime hours/For [expletive] pay/So I can sit out here, and waste my life away/ Drag back home, and drown my troubles away.”
But the song goes much deeper.
“What the world’s gotten to/For people like me, and people like you,” Mr. Anthony sings.
“Wish I could just wake up, and it not be true/But it is, oh, it is/Living in the new world/With an old soul/These rich men north of Richmond/Lord knows they all just want to have total control.”
Mr. Anthony doesn’t say where exactly that spot “north of Richmond” is, but you know as well as I do.
It’s the wealthiest island of counties in the country, probably the world.
Its epicenter is Washington, D.C.
And yes, its aim, as anyone knows who has followed the controversies over such things as gas stoves, eating insects, drag shows in public libraries, and the response to COVID-19, is total control.
Anthony covered a lot of ground in this three-minute song.
Jeffery Epstein is referenced here, although not by name: “I wish politicians would look out for miners, and not just minors on an island somewhere.”
And so is the smarmy and insidious virtue-cratic exercise in democratic despotism we know as the welfare establishment.
“Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t nothing to eat/And the obese milking welfare/Well, God if you’re 5 foot 3 and you’re 300 pounds/Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds/Young men are putting themselves six feet in the ground/Cause all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down.”
It’s also a warning shot across the bow of the self-satisfied managers of the uniparty that controls us.
They seem impregnable in their citadels of well-groomed affluence.
Anyone who has flipped through some of the more sanguinary pages of history knows just how illusory that sensation of impregnability is.
Let them hear who have ears to hear.
