It can be a little bit embarrassing admitting that you are a Country music fan when you’re a middle-class journalist living in London. It carries a certain stigma: “Isn’t that just music for rednecks?” someone asked me recently, somewhat baffled. A similar prejudice has accompanied the explosive success of Oliver Anthony and his track “Rich Men North of Richmond”.
With its attacks on both the political elite and the idle poor, Anthony’s “Rich Men” has proved uniquely conflicting for today’s political class, both a provincial cry against the urban elite and a working-class rebel yell, raging against poverty wages. Despite its attacks on corporate exploitation, it has quickly been adopted as a conservative anthem, while many on the Left have found it difficult to support its attacks on welfare and less-than-subtle allusions to paedophile conspiracy theories.
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