“The Politics of Song — The Music of Time”
About one song used in the recent, tumultuous, USA’s 2024 Presidential Election.
Let’s be frank. In modern times America is well-known and liked by many not because of its politics but because of its popular songs. Its people, the nation, its music industry gets to places other songs, words and melodies don’t reach.
The very best of the USA’s popular songs have a way of telling the truth without pretenses. They sing a lingua franca. They are songs of a primal, democratic self. Almost selfless, but not quite. It is “I” talking to “I” — truthfully. It hurts. It’s good. It’s almost embarrassing. It’s lyrical. Shut up my brain and hear my soul.
Numerous are the ways this phenomenon has been known in Europe. Jean-Paul Sartre ended his excruciating classic novel Nausea (La nausée, 1938) with a scene where the hero experiences redemption because he hears a Black American blues singer. Likewise in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf (Der Steppenwolf, 1927) the hero hears a blues song from a bar room cellar while roaming the streets of his city and feels oddly redeemed.
What’s up with this potent stuff? Do you hear it now, dear reader?
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When a song is sung in a group it has enormous power to concentrate and focus. Most people have experienced this at one time or another — maybe specially in childhood? — when you sang a national anthem. Perhaps some of us have experienced this sensation of musical union one night at a party when everyone belted it out together or when crowds sing a heartening song at a sports arena. Liverpool Football Club fans (“The Reds”) know it from singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.
Since 2006 FC Augsburg chant a rousing “Rot, Grün, Weiß” for their official club anthem.
Some songs had a purpose during the USA’s 2024 presidential election season. The man who became America’s current 47th president with a popular vote “majority” of 49.8% used songs to warm up his crowd as a supporting act before the featured act — the headliner DJT.
He or his handlers knew what they were doing with song. It activates emotional reasoning, a gut feeling that “proves” something is true.
Among other musical compositions Mr. 49.8% used the peculiar and gut-wrenching “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Perry for warm up. (Which song you can find and listen to on YouTube as noted below).
This is this essay’s center piece that you’re just about to read about — if you’ve walked alone this far into these perambulations about the music of time
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Disclaimer: I have no intention to favor Captain Chaos, President 47. That’s not the point. Lest there be any misunderstanding, please let it be understood that I do not wish to overload readers with this “Rich Men North of Richmond” song for reasons of political bias.
When he wrote and performed the song, the singer-songwriter Oliver Perry was fed up with both the Republicans and Democrats. Which shows, I think, that this song is a particular kind of populist expression of fatigue and disgust with the existent political system. It’s a call for help in what many people feel — at this late winer moment of 2025 — is a helpless time.
It’s a “politically incoherent song punching up at the wealthy and punching down at the poor” as critic Chris Molanphy wrote. Moreover, Perry considers himself, as he is quoted by Tyler Piccotti, “dead center down the aisle” about US politics. Perry said: “I remember as a kid the conservatives wanting war and me not understanding that. And I remember a lot of the controversies when the left took office, and it seems like, you know, both sides serve the same master.”
It’s an unusual plague-on-both-their-houses song. I’d suggest this kind of song also exists with the
vinegar-and-milk mix in the multi-versions of the Lennon-McCartney “Revolution” as performed by John Lennnon and the Beatles. Maybe this caustic, darkly witty, irritation and irony blend is there too in Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry”, specially the Johnny Cash version. And maybe also with Tom Petty’s “I won’t Back Down” — which both Democrats and Republicans used to inspire them equally against one another. Something is not working all-round.
The writer-singer Oliver Perry has said in print that he considers it neither a left nor a right wing song. Though, yes, it was used by Delusional Donald at his local, regional rallies. That’s business. And likely poor Perry got royalties. (But we may never know. It’s intellectual property private business. And business often means private accountancy and not for the public record.)
This ambiguous act makes “Rich Men North of Richmond” politically troubling for sure. Just so, it’s worth our consideration.
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The song — have you heard it yet? — “Rich Men North of Richmond” by the Virginia-based Oliver Perry is American country music from today. It’s straight acoustic. It’s just a man, his voice, a guitar. It’s not a song that asks to be liked. It’s straight forward, but twisty with anguish.
In this song the singer had a dream, a bad version of the American dream. Not a benediction but a malediction. Not a prayer asking for divine blessing, but a call for help. It’s a distress signal set to a tune that reaches out and can’t find what the singer needs.
Who would hear his complaint if it wasn’t sung? It uses the oneiric quality of song to create for the audience a single unified impression. The song stretches out a hand grasping for…for what? An answer? A leader? An aching in the heart that resists, that seeks…what?
This song was not custom made for political rallies. Mr. Perry did not write it in praise of Media Monster Mr. Trump. But it was used at Trump rallies around the nation, and particularly in the US South. However, it was not used among the forty-one sings that headlined the Republican National Convention. “Rich Men” was a local hit.
The closest “Rich Men North of Richmond” got to national political play was when it was used as a warm-up for the Republican Party Debates’ audience. And, remember, that was a series of debates of January-June 2024 that the New York City Real Estate Mogul begrudgingly participated in, and in which Nikki Haley came in second with a remarkable 19.7% against the “wannabe dictator” DJT.
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Politics and politicians hook on to popular culture in all sorts of ways to broaden their reach. This process is accomplished awkwardly or smoothly. Sometimes the politicians’ media-managers get the music choice right and sometimes they don’t. Things move fast in a US Presidential political campaign and a lot gets broken.
Ronald Reagan’s handlers mistakenly took Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as a pro-Republican Party anthem. Which, if you know the song, it most definitely is not. Springsteen halted the use of his “Born in the USA” number one hit with a cease-and-desist order. This is a legally enforceable order from a court or government agency that directs someone to stop engaging in a particular activity. Or else. That is, or else a serious monetary or jail-time penalty could follow. (Indeed, there’s a whole Wikipedia cite dedicated to this US situation and the roughly forty-five “Musicians who oppose Donald Trump's use of their music”.)
The list is long of successful use and unhappy misuse of popular song for political reasons. Perhaps the most notorious example of the good use of a song in US politics is the application of Ager’s and Yellen’s jubilant anthem “Happy Days are Here Again” (1929) — to celebrate the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as US President in 1933. The song was re-purposed later on in the same year when FDR’s-supported 21st Amendment repealed prohibition — the nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol ended.
An illustrative range of other popular song examples used in US Presidential election campaigns include: the Merle Travis 1946 “Sixteen Tons” as performed by Tennessee Ernie Ford (1955); “Dancing In the Streets” as sung by Martha and the Vandellas (1964); Mann and Weil’s “We Gotta Get Out of the Place” as performed by Eric Burdon and the Animals (1965); “Ballad of the Green Berets” (1966) by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler; Aretha Franklin’s version of Otis Redding’s “Respect” (1967); Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop [Thinkin’ About Tomorrow]” (1977); the Village People’s gay disco music romp “Y.M.C.A.” (1978); and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” (1983). The list goes on.
Perry’s “Rich Men” had a particular use and meaning. Put the text in context. His song is witness to the temper of unrest in America’s post-pandemic agitation, this grassroots, popular-populist expression that brought about the re-election of the nation’s most game-changing president since Ronald Reagan. It’s existential Angst und Einsamkeit at a country music peak.
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This song was first released in August 2023, in the wake of Covid-19. It was a meteoric social media, viral hit — done by a nobody in his own backyard.
Within days it excelled with sales and streaming charts. It quickly debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its singer-songwriter author was the first artist to become king of the mountain on the decisive Billboard chart without any prior Hit Parade history.
That’s what’s grassroots is after all. It’s populism from the land that created the word. It’s a social, cultural, political philosophy that supports the rights and power of ordinary people in their struggle against the privileged elite. It's thin on ideology and fat on emotions.
In a single breath the song begins with the working-man’s lament: “I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay / So I can sit out here and waste my life away / Drag back home and drown my troubles away” — growling to someone close to him. A friend, a wife, his god, or maybe just his mongrel dog in the back yard filled with junk. Maybe it’s just us.
He doesn’t want what he has. He wants to be released: “Wish I could just wake up and it not be true / But it is, oh, it is.” He wants you and I to be set free: “For people like me and people like you.” This singer is not off on some airy cloud. He’s down-to-earth as one can be: “…workin’ all day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay.”
You like your job? You like what’s become of the country? You like being shafted?
He does not name one party or the other. It’s his human condition in America now he’s anguished about. It’s the worst kind of sorry. You feel cut up but can’t identify the thing that sliced you up. You flail out, looking for a cause.
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The singer once had so much hope: “Livin' in the new world” — but now he’s prematurely aged “with an old soul.” Not without reason, because he thinks there could be a source for his woes.
Know that the singer is American Southern. That says a lot.
Hear how right from the get-go Perry accents that distinction with his southern twang. His southern drawl. That voice is a class and region marker. As the singer-writer Tom Petty says: “There's a southern accent, where I come from / The young 'uns call it country / The Yankees call it dumb.”
This is where people say “pin” for “pen”. They say “yaw” instead of “your”, “wheukin” instead of “wor-king”, and “baws” instead of“boss”. (Just listen to Elvis Presley’s huge hit version of Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man”.)
The late, great Jimmy Carter did not say “parr-tea” for “party” — but “pah-tea”. There is no flat, round, standard English here. Southern American English is a sculpted language, hard as hickory and soft as a magnolia blossom.
This is the rugged area that lost the American Civil War. That claimed and fought a second war of independence in America from 1861 to 1865. This is the area where people bled out and lost big time. To who?
Well, Mr. Oliver Perry says it: “These rich men north of Richmond” that once got their “total control” when they won the Civil War and are back again with a vengeance. They’re the problem.
One can’t help but think that Mr. Perry must have been revolted by the sight of the plutocratic, oligarchic Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg flanking Donald Trump at his inauguration on January 20, 2025, and so on thereafter…But, back to the song…
Richmond was once the capitol of the Confederate States of America, the CSA. They lost. They wanted to go their own way. They wanted their freedom. That freedom had all sorts of dark and bright desires. But it was theirs. They lost and have never forgotten that dispossession.
Now we’re in a world where they “Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do / And they don't think you know, but I know that you do”. Because you are algorithmed. Because you are the product. Because you lose. As if the Civil War wasn’t bad enough.
Is he right? Bad question. That’s not the problem. He tells his truth as he sees it.
What’s worse is the rich men have upped the ante. Old time Southern slavery was pretty messed up. But what’s happening now? We’re in thrall to the rich men’s machines. Them. The fat cats north of Richmond.
North is a condition, not just an actual place. North is where the power brokers stretch out their tentacles from.
The big words for this condition are oligarchy and plutocracy. But you don’t need the ten-dollar words. You can hear, see, feel it when workers like miners aren’t respected but rich kids are. Types like Manhattan’s rich kids “on an island somewhere” that suffer the crimes and death of a Jeffery Epstein.
And so there’s social security, relief and welfare. So what. It’s for who, for what? So horizontally and vertically challenged people on relief can stuff themselves with chocolate, with plastic bags of crapy “fudge rounds”? While young man who volunteered to serve their country now lie dead “six feet in the ground”. For what?
Do you hear it now, dear reader? The singer asks: What’s happened? All he knows is that he knows “it's a damn shame what the world's gotten to / For people like me and people like you”. The lament repeats. And in that lament there’s a call for help. There’s a passionate expression of grief and sorrow. With a bite. He’s angry. He’s not giving up. There’s a resistance in this singer’s complaint that a lot of people can hear and feel.
People heard. Go look at the Billboard Hot 100.
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In sum, “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Perry doesn’t lie. It hurts. Did this twisted story get a conclusion? Is it a curse on both their houses, a criticism of all politicians both Democrats and Republicans? Where really is “north of Richmond”?
If the response is in the political, social and cultural outcome of the 2024 US Presidential election for President of the United States of America, well, as of this writing, the prognosis does not look good, folks. At best, maybe the jury is still out.
From one perspective it looks like instead of “I Wish I Was in Dixie” or “The South Shall Rise Again” the place that’s in, the place where the rise has come again, is in MAGA’s success and a rich man who claims at heart he is not rich. He feels your pain. He knows that place “that prevails in the underworld, where the Brotherhood of Man finds its most logical development and candid advocacy” — as the writer Ambrose Bierce once wrote.
But does he feel it? Does he act on healing the poor man’s pain? Pardon Myself Donald is magisterial at denying visible facts, like the January 6th, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that he inspired. Now the nation’s oligarchs and plutocrats are cuddled up by King Donald’s side, attending his favor. Rich men north of Richmond.
* * *
We are yet in the early days of a continental — maybe an intercontinental — storm. The results will unfold in time’s fullness and the storm’s fury. “Rich Men North of Richmond” registers its righteous claims. There seems to be a fog of war out there. Are you lost in the new storm too?
As the transatlantic journal the Economist declares in its Newsletter’s banner: “American politics matters intensely to the rest of the world.” Because since at least the time of the Second World War, that nation has a magnetism, a momentum that effects all others on this earth in big and little ways. So it is with the USA’s popular songs. To paraphrase Magritte’s painting “This is not a pipe” — this is not just music.
The list continues into a lacework of relationships. Listen closely to the messages in songs like “Rich Men North of Richmond” that sing out from both sides of the USA’s current war of discontent, of social, cultural and class discord. Why are some songs so powerful, so effective, that they are used by both sides simultaneously? Do different yet the same songs mean that the nation’s motto is affirmed — e pluribus unum, out of many, one?
As Victor Hugo said: “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
To be listened to. And un-puzzled — if we can.
Thank you.
PS. “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Anthony @: Oliver Anthony - Rich Men North Of Richmond
PPS. BIBLIOGRAPHY
. “That Welfare-Bashing Country Song Is Still Atop the Charts, but There’s a Silver Lining” by Chris Molanphy, Slate, Sept 01, 2023; @: https://slate.com/culture/2023/09/oliver-anthony-rich-men-north-of-richmond-billboard.html
. “10 Things You Probably Don’t Know About ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ Singer Oliver Anthony” by Tyler Piccotti, on the Biography site, August 23, 2023, @: https://www.biography.com/musicians/a44889067/oliver-anthony-facts.
. RNC 2024 Roll Call Playlist [singer & song list]. “Songs We Heard at the RNC” — Washington Post & Spotify, @: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/28mqOfM5ReX1bAjk49x05p
. DNC 2024 Roll Call Playlist [singer & song list], @: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4qxuSibT1VUQCehpCoPdml
. “The music of Team Harris is ethnically diverse and of the moment, and Team Trump’s picks are white and what one might call ‘oldies.’ “ by Kevin Dolak, August 20, 202, The Hollywood Reporter homepage; @: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/kamala-harris-donald-trump-music-2024-campaigns-1235977398/
. “Controversial country song ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ makes US chart history”, by Adrian Horton, in The Guardian, Mon 21 Aug 2023, online @: Controversial country song Rich Men North of Richmond makes US chart history
. Linguistics & Southern accents, see @: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/united-states-of-accents-southern-american-english
. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, “Rich”.
. “Southern Accents” - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, @: Southern Accents - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers;
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=Lyrics+Southern+accents+tom+petty
. US Political culture & ideology: "Democracy Index 2015: Democracy in an age of anxiety" (PDF). The Economist, @: https://www.yabiladi.com/img/content/EIU-Democracy-Index-2015.pdf; Economist Intelligence Unit. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 March 2016.
. Wikipedia, “Musicians who oppose Donald Trump's use of their music”, @: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicians_who_oppose_Donald_Trump%27s_use_of_their_music#:~:text=The%20Rolling%20Stones,-Both%20Mick%20Jagger&text=The%20band%20sent%20him%20cease,the%20song%20is%20used%20again
. The Economist Newsletter is “subscriber only” via e-mail and its stated purpose is to “Catch up quickly on the global stories that matter”.
Songs cited, in chronological order:
. Milton Ager & Jack Yellen: “Happy Days are Here Again” (1929)
. Merle Travis 1946 “Sixteen Tons” as performed by Tennessee Ernie Ford (1955)
. “Dancing In the Streets” as sung by Martha and the Vandellas (1964)
. “We Gotta Get Out of the Place” by Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, as performed by Eric Burdon and the Animals (1965)
. “Ballad of the Green Berets” by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler (1966)
. “Respect”, originally written & performed by Otis Redding (1965) and then rephrased & appropriated by Aretha Franklin in her woman’s liberation version (1967)
. “Revolution” by John Lennon, Paul McCartney & the Beatles (1968 — released in three versions).
. Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop [Thinkin’ About Tomorrow]” (1977)
. The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” (1978; aka: YMCA)
. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” (1983).
. “Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen (1984)
