2023-08-25 21:59:42
An American country singer, still completely unknown 15 days ago and now number one in music sales in the United States, on Friday rejected any political recovery following elected officials and Republican presidential candidates of 2024 tried to dub it.
• Read also: Anti-elite country song tops US charts
With his piece of bluegrass Rich Men North of Richmond – named following the capital of Virginia 175 km south of Washington – Oliver Anthony, a 30-year-old farm worker, beat megastars Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen and Olivia Rodrigo this week to claim the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Unheard of for a musician who has never appeared on any music charts.
Released on August 11 on YouTube with its clip, the song, sold, listened to in streamingdownloaded and seen on the Internet more than 30 million times, has become the anthem of the rural United States who feel impoverished in the conservative South and the center, in the face of the supposedly rich 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 once morest the economic policy of Democratic President Joe Biden.
Ron DeSantis
Getty Images via AFP
Many elected officials and commentators on the right and the far right even consider it the “political anthem of blue-collar workers” and “Americans forgotten by the 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 10-minute video posted on YouTube.
“It’s infuriating to see certain musicians and politicians act as if we were friends, as if we were fighting the same battles”, he still rejected.
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 far beyond Joe Biden”.
The singer affirms, sometimes on the verge of tears, “to hate that we use [sa] song as a political weapon.
“The right tries to brand me as one of their own and the left tries to discredit me, in retaliation, I imagine. This shit must stop”, warns the one who claimed to be “right in the middle” of the socio-economic concerns of Americans.
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