By now you probably will have heard, or at least heard about, Rich Men North of Richmond. Oliver Anthony’s howling country protest song has appeared seemingly from nowhere to top the charts in the US this week, and inspire almost as many comment pieces as YouTube streams in the process. Framed as a hymn for the downtrodden working man in the vein of Woody Guthrie, it also smuggles in some rightwing talking points about overweight welfare recipients and taxation, prompting criticism from the left and whoops of support from conservatives.
The success of Rich Men, the first song to top the Billboard Top 100 by an artist who has never charted before, is remarkable enough on its own. Even more striking is that it’s the third ostensibly rightwing cultural US hit of the summer. Earlier this month, country star Jason Aldean also topped the Billboard charts with Try That in a Small Town, a paean to vigilanteism accompanied by a racially loaded (and since re-edited) music video. And over in Hollywood, Sound of Freedom, a child sex-trafficking drama accused of laundering QAnon conspiracies, has ridden high in the box office ever since its release in early July. (Sound of Freedom’s film-makers deny that the film is left- or rightwing, arguing that the issue of sex trafficking “spans the political spectrum”. UK viewers can see for themselves when it arrives in cinemas next week.)
So what’s going on here? Is this stuff actually massively popular? Are we witnessing the sudden, unstoppable rise of rightwing culture, finally displacing those liberal snowflakes who have dominated the entertainment industry for decades? The truth is more complicated. But I think it can be explained by one man … LadBaby.
Yes, LadBaby, AKA YouTuber Mark Ian Hoyle, whose annual assault on the Christmas No 1 race with his sausage-roll pentalogy of charity singles has become a (for some, unwelcome) tradition in the UK. For our international readers, every December for the past five years LadBaby has released a savoury-pastry themed parody of an 80s soft-rock staple (Starship, Journey etc), and every year it has rocketed to the top of the charts just in time for the mince pies to be put out under the chimney. Inevitably the song has plummeted down the chart immediately after making contact with the top spot, but by then its job has been done: heaps of cash have been acquired for food poverty charity the Trussell Trust, and awareness has been raised (for the cause and for LadBaby himself).
While presumably someone out there actually enjoys listening to the 36-year-old’s music, his success is largely gestural: people are downloading the song to raise money and awareness, to help make a point publicly about food poverty. It’s why LadBaby’s streaming stats are, compared with most No 1s, relatively small: one of his chart-toppers, Don’t Stop Me Eatin’, has amassed just 1.7m streams on Spotify.
But, ultimately, streaming is immaterial to LadBaby (above, centre): instead his success is down to downloads and, to a lesser extent, physical sales (yes, CD singles do still exist). That’s not just because physical sales/downloads equal more money for his chosen charities but also because the charts are weighted heavily towards those formats: in the UK charts one physical sale or digital sale is deemed the same as 600 streams of a song on ad-supported platforms – eg YouTube or Spotify’s free tier – or 100 streams on a paid-for platform. (Billboard uses a metric that is somewhat similar but not identical, with radio airplay also factored in to the equation.)
It’s an admirable model in a way, rewarding paying for music at a time when far too few performers are being adequately remunerated for their work. Still, it’s hardly an accurate measure for gauging what is truly popular, given that most of us consume music through streaming rather than individual purchases. And it can be easily gamed – by chart-savvy fans wanting to propel their favourite artist to No 1, by crusty-snack-based charity appeals, or perhaps by actors in a never-ending culture war. (Quick aside: as this great piece on Rich Men North of Richmond from Jaime Brooks at the New Inquiry shows, chart-gaming is an absolutely fascinating topic. Koreans even have a term for it: sajaegi.)
While Jason Aldean is not LadBaby – the country star’s impressive streaming numbers dwarf I Love Sausage Rolls et al – there are some striking parallels between the two. For one, Try That in a Small Town’s rise to the top was built on some very big digital download figures, suggesting a purposeful attempt to send it to No 1. As explained in this excellent primer by US music charts expert Chris Molanphy, the song’s dramatic climb up the charts came immediately after suggestions, from Aldean and others, that he was being cancelled after Country Music Television’s decision to pull the incendiary video from the air. This prompted a chart protest in the vein of the one that propelled Rage Against the Machine to UK Christmas No 1 ahead of X Factor’s Joe McElderry in 2009, but this time with an added dose of “owning- the-libs” trolling.
But – again, as with LadBaby – what goes up must very quickly come down. The week after it hit top spot, Try That plummeted 20 places in the charts, the third most precipitous drop in Billboard’s history. Obviously that will have been little concern to the people who got it to the top in the first place, but it is indicative of the song’s illusory popularity: this isn’t a song that everyone is listening to all summer in the manner of say, Get Lucky. It’s just pretending to be.
Sound of Freedom’s box office success is an even more extreme example of this kind of illusory chart-gaming. Its producer, the faith-based Angel Studios, has adopted a pay-it-forward model, allowing tickets to be bought on behalf of “someone who would not otherwise be able to see the film”. (Another aside: this I Think You Should Leave sketch is the final word on the whole concept of paying it forward.) Angel Studios’ approach has allowed the film (pictured above) to stick around near the top of the US box office charts all summer even though, according to numerous reports, cinemas showing it are often empty, because those charts are based on ticket sales rather than actual bums on seats.
In the case of Rich Men North of Richmond, though, things are a little more complicated. Its rise isn’t the result of a confected controversy, as with Try That, and it hasn’t adopted an obvious marketing campaign, as with Sound of Freedom. It has unarguably been a viral hit, and its talk of downtrodden folk and shadowy elites has clearly chimed with many. In the UK, far from the raging US culture wars, it’s currently Top 30 in the midweek charts. (The song is admittedly quite earwormy too – I’ve struggled to get Anthony’s appealingly strangled yelping out of my head all week.) Still, the heavy presence of downloads at the centre of its chart-topping success in the US has raised eyebrows, and it will be interesting to see if it tumbles down the charts like Aldean did a few weeks before.
Still, globe-straddling success isn’t really the aim for these works. It’s the feeling of globe-straddling success, the sense that a silent majority are consuming these songs and films, and rejecting the “woke nonsense” pumped out by liberal Hollywood. By that metric, and the endless attention given to this trio, you have to say it’s been a success.
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