Where did the overnight chart-topping song Rich Men North of Richmond come from?

25:00Bradley Cooper's prosthetic nose for Maestro, and Oliver Anthony’s unlikely hit

Oliver Anthony's song Rich Men North of Richmond might just be the most unlikely song of the summer.

Hailing from the town of Farmville, Virginia, the singer-songwriter posted a video of him performing his song on YouTube – the first song, he says, he ever recorded using a professional microphone.

Practically overnight, the song got a boost from listeners and public figures alike for its themes as a working man's anthem. Now, it's already topping the iTunes, Spotify, and Apple Music charts.

Culture critics Niko Stratis, Richie Assaly and Chandler Levack join guest host Amil Niazi to discuss why the song is currently breaking the internet in some circles, and what its popularity says about this cultural moment.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, where the panel discusses Bradley Cooper's recent prosthetic nose controversy and the viral parody Planet of the Bass, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Amil: Niko, 10 days ago nobody outside of Virginia knew about Oliver Anthony. Now he's the most talked-about artist in country music. Who's this guy?

Niko: We know very little. It's this very concerted effort that we know very little, I feel like. He's sort of released information about himself in fits and starts. The story initially was he lives off-grid on a pig farm. He has sort of expanded on his own narrative a little bit and said he used to work in a factory in Virginia and he had an accident, and now he lives in a trailer. He seems very rural, he's working class. I don't think any of this stuff is necessarily fabricated, but he is this person that's just sort of appeared out of nowhere. Oliver Anthony is not his real name; that's his grandfather's name. That's what he records under to honour his father and the spirit of Appalachia that he says his grandfather comes from.

He's very much this blank slate that a lot of people are transposing a lot of ideas onto. It is very easy to transpose a lot of ideas onto a guy that looks like almost every other white guy with a beard. Now we are seeing his face everywhere, partially because the left is turning him into a meme nonstop and the right is pushing him as the second coming of the voice of a generation.

WATCH | Oliver Anthony performs Rich Men North Of Richmond:

Amil: Yeah, he's the right-wing Arlo Guthrie, and he's all we have left. Richie, this song comes on the heels of Jason Aldean's Try That in a Small Town. Do you think that the timing of that has contributed to this song's success?

Richie: Yeah, I definitely see them as related and the timing mattering. Try That in a Small Town is this sort of grating song that is ostensibly an ode to small towns, but it's actually kind of chocked full of these reactionary racist dog whistles. It wasn't actually a hit when it came out back in May. It only became a major hit when Aldean released a video, which was filled with this sort of violent, pseudo-fascist imagery. It caused a lot of controversy, got taken off of the TV and everything like that. It was only at this point that this song really exploded, once this discourse started getting under way. The right sort of turned Aldean into this martyr for the culture war, and Republicans really rallied around this song and it eventually shot up the charts.

There's a lot of discussion about how this Oliver Anthony song is this sort of organic success story, just this guy on a guitar, but I think he's really benefiting from a conservative base in America that's primed to rally around another country song that fits the Republican narrative and to wring as much viral capital out of it as they can. This wasn't a perfectly organic story; there was what felt like a coordinated effort by far right politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and alt-right guys like Matt Walsh. So in my opinion, it feels like conservatives are sort of latching onto or weaponizing country music, as they have in the past, as this sort of new frontier in the culture war that I think is working for them. I think that really does go a long way to explain its success.

Amil: Chandler, I think it's easy to sometimes laugh off stuff like this, but on YouTube it's got 80,000 positive comments. So what is it in this song that people are really responding to?

Chandler: I feel like it goes back to the way that Trump's campaign was successful in the mid-2010s — this idea of giving a voice to this frustrated working class American voter that just wants to feed his family and work for a living wage. It has that sentimentality to it, and there's a real earnestness about it. I mean, at first I thought he was like a new Mumford & Son or a member of Iron & Wine when I saw a picture of him. But there's just something about the folded up camping chair, his two dogs at his feet and this kind of stripped acoustic performance that I think people are giving him so much more authenticity than he deserves. But it does kind of strike a nerve. I think there's this kind of rallying cry. It's not like the issues that he's pointing out aren't what we're all facing, like the rising cost of inflation and the insane way that governments treated people after the pandemic. But I think that often, country just feels so overproduced that maybe there's an authenticity to him that people connect with.

Amil: Niko, he said his views are pretty dead centre down the aisle when it comes to politics. What do you think the song actually reflects?

Niko: Dead centre is a nice thing you say when you want to appear moderate because you don't want to be seen as having a political affiliation. It is an easy way to gain this sort of virality where you take this passive approach to your own personal politics, even though you can hear it. Those [lyrics] are very deliberate little dog whistles. We know what all those things are about.

The thing about him is this thing that a lot of people really like, which is the piousness and the virtue of the working man. That isn't really real, but you can sell it really nicely, right? You can put a lawn chair and a couple of dogs at somebody's feet. He can sing like he's trying to impress everybody in an open mic, and all of a sudden it feels authentic — and whether it is or not doesn't really matter. He can claim his politics are down the centre, even though I don't think he's dipping his toe into the left all that often. There's nothing in what he has said or what he has written that leads me to believe that he might lean a little bit leftist; it's all pretty right-wing, and that's fine. But … it's not a song that is appealing to the left-wing.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show, where the panel discusses Bradley Cooper's recent prosthetic nose controversy and the viral parody Planet of the Bass, on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.