A Rational Discussion About Oliver Anthony, Jason Aldean, and the Current State of the Pop-Chart Culture Wars
“Rich Men North of Richmond” and “Try That in a Small Town” have inspired their share of debate recently—as have Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, and, uh, Lizzo. But what does it all mean? Two Ringer writers try to make sense of it.
Oliver Anthony, a relatively unknown country singer-songwriter from Farmville, Virginia, just rocketed to the top of the pop charts with a baffling viral protest song called “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Jason Aldean, a veteran country hitmaker, recently enjoyed his own crossover stint at no. 1 with his uncharacteristically provocative culture-war broadside called “Try That in a Small Town.” Morgan Wallen is one of the biggest pop stars on earth, whether you like it or not.
Beyond country, superstars like Taylor Swift and Lizzo and critical favorites like the Chicago rapper Noname have spent the summer fighting their own battles in the extramusical sphere—some by choice, some not. Is all pop music just culture-war fodder now? Is it any worse than it ever has been, and can it ever get any better? Ringer senior staff writers Justin Charity and Rob Harvilla hash it out.
Charity: This has been an overwhelmingly eventful August, as far as music controversies go. I haven’t been this hot and bothered since Kanye’s rollout for Kids See Ghosts.
Where to start? We’re now humoring two different chart-topping political anthems from the country scene, one from the proven hitmaker Jason Aldean, from Georgia, the other sung by the overnight sensation Oliver Anthony, from Virginia. Aldean’s and Anthony’s songs have both been co-opted by Fox News and accordingly ridiculed by progressives—Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” as a trigger-happy rant against carjackers, antifa, and other “urban” maladies and Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” as, nominally and at least initially, a populist broadside against the feckless leaders in Washington that then weirdly segues to a rant about overweight people buying Fudge Rounds with EBT in Farmville. These songs aren’t just social media fodder; Aldean, Anthony, and Morgan Wallen have had the last three no. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, meaning they held down the spot for country music for all of August.
Meanwhile, in hip-hop, the decidedly progressive rapper Noname released her latest album, Sundial, featuring a verse from Jay Electronica in which he raps, as he often does, about Jewish people. Noname has rather defiantly defended her inclusion of the verse on her album, thus launching yet another round of fraught discourse about hip-hop and antisemitism.
Also, Lizzo is canceled—her controversy is speculative at this stage and thus somewhat hard to fairly summarize, but it basically involves three of her backup dancers, who are suing her for various forms of harassment.
By the power of conspiratorial thinking—word to Jay Electronica—I’ve become convinced that these controversies are all, on some level and to varying degrees, connected, so far as they each illustrate some unwieldiness in how artists and their fans develop a sort of pseudo-political rapport, sometimes productively, sometimes perilously, in the social media age. We’ve come a long and awful way in the six years since I wrote that one column about Taylor Swift.
I also understand that you and at least one of our editors are currently engaged in your own manner of conspiratorial thinking about the invisible hand behind the promotion of “Rich Men North of Richmond” in particular.
Harvilla: So first let’s focus on the country music of it all, as exemplified by this Oliver Anthony fella, who does indeed have the no. 1 song in America as we speak and who constitutes Phase 3 of what has indeed been an endless, exasperating summer for those inclined to hear country music primarily as yet another front in the culture war.
Phase 1 is Morgan Wallen, who is the reason this endless, exasperating summer of “country music as culture war” has lasted two and a half years. Since he was caught on camera using a racial slur in February 2021—and after weathering a brief, purgatorial banishment from radio playlists, award-show stages, and the like—Wallen has defiantly reigned as the biggest pop star in America. His 2023 behemoth One Thing at a Time has spent 15 weeks as the no. 1 album in America; as we speak, it’s no. 2, with his 2021 behemoth Dangerous: The Double Album unbudgeable at no. 10. (His only competition as the biggest pop star in America is your girl Taylor Swift, who is enjoying a relatively frictionless and delightful stretch of apolitical bliss. I’m sure that will last forever.)
Now, musically, as mainstream country goes, Wallen is the best-case scenario: He makes serene soft rock disguised as raucous bro-country, with an easy wit and unforced charisma that explain why America has streamed these 60-odd songs approximately 12 billion times apiece. Wallen himself has never quite come out swinging against cancel culture onstage or in song, but it’s hard not to view his outrageous success as a backlash to the backlash. His dominance can’t help but feel political. One thing Morgan Wallen can definitely tell you is that you can’t tell him nothing.
Phase 2 is Jason Aldean, veteran superstar, who broke out in 2010 with “Dirt Road Anthem”—back when rapping while wearing a cowboy hat was a much bolder stunt to try in a small town—and has reigned as a reliable genre heavyweight ever since, albeit with genre-blockbuster songs that feel interchangeable and risk averse both musically and lyrically, despite his outspoken Conservatism. Here, too, despite the police-blotter dystopia of the lyrics—from liquor-store holdups to granny carjackings to flag-burning—“Try That in a Small Town” didn’t feel like an outlier when it came out in May to little notice and smaller acclaim. The song’s video—filmed in part at a Tennessee courthouse where a Black teen was lynched in 1927 and spliced with since-removed footage of a Black Lives Matter protest amid scenes of civil unrest captured in the United States, Canada, and Ukraine—is what sent it rocketing to no. 1. Wallen is a crossover chart superstar despite the culture war; Aldean is solely because of it.
Enter this guy.
The burly beard. The studied gruffness. The sad dogs moping at his feet. The Not a Working Man’s Guitar. The Definitely Not a Working Man’s Microphone. Given the still-raging Aldean of it all, I don’t really blame anybody for clocking this guy as a political stunt, a Twitter-borne provocation, a protest vote first and an enjoyable Americana singer a distant last. I don’t believe in the idea of an industry plant—I’ll just assume you agree with me on that—but “Rich Men North of Richmond” feels like a trap, and it turns out it is, though it’s deliciously unclear, at this hour, what this trap is, precisely, and who’s stuck in it.
So: Does Oliver Anthony feel “real” to you? Does his no. 1 song feel real? Do you think a single person on earth has listened to “Try That in a Small Town” for pure musical pleasure? And what do you think of the no. 2 song in America as we speak, a.k.a. Luke Combs’s blockbuster cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”?
Charity: Here, I’ll begin to disagree with you, as I think the common conflation of Aldean and Anthony is unfair to Anthony. It’s easy in hindsight to read a sort of master plan for hyperpolarized virality via Fox & Friends into “Rich Men North of Richmond,” but really, I don’t think the stuff Anthony is singing about is as straightforwardly pandering as Aldean’s posturing against criminals and activists in big cities. I hear in Anthony what I hear in a lot of opinionated musicians: incoherence. I can’t say I’m surprised that he also sings the praises of diversity. Of course he’ll be full of surprises.
Lyrics don’t have to strictly make sense to resonate with people, and while I think he’s obviously invited some political scrutiny, I think interacting with Anthony’s song as if it were a stump speech that we’re now obliged to meticulously fact-check, as Eric Levitz did for New York, is profoundly misguided. It’s music. When I warned fans against grafting their political convictions and post-Trump anxieties onto Taylor Swift, because Taylor Swift isn’t really built for that, I tried to avoid implying that Taylor Swift is stupid. She’s not stupid! But she’s not an essayist, you know? And she’s not an activist. And she’s not a politician. She’s a musician at the end of the day, with all the strengths and limitations that implies. That’s what I think about Oliver Anthony.
All of that said, I think “Try That in a Small Town” is a way more straightforwardly brain-dead circle jerk of a song. It’s not terrible, musically; it just reminds me a lot of what the radio on my school bus sounded like for a solid two years after 9/11.
Also, I think the Wallen angst is overstated at this stage. I suppose I’d still be in a different headspace about him if his original sin here were some sort of weirdly vindictive meltdown à la Michael Richards, but as it stands, as a Black guy, I don’t know. If I’m being honest, I can’t really say that I care at this point. It’s an awkward conversation piece, for sure, but not some mortal sin or irreparable derailment of my enjoyment of a handful of songs from Morgan Wallen—namely, “Sunrise.” Likewise, I guess, I’m not entirely sure why I’m supposed to be mad about Luke Combs’s cover of “Fast Car” in the first place. I keep encountering the argument that it’s racist for country radio to play a popular country artist’s cover of a noncountry song when country radio wouldn’t have played the noncountry artist’s (again, noncountry) song in its original form; and I keep waiting for someone to point out how weirdly transparently inane this reasoning is, but it never happens. It’s a good cover! I thought Natalie Weiner and Marissa Moss had a very sensible conversation about it over at Don’t Rock the Inbox.
There. I’ve survived your country music gauntlet. Now, my fellow Ohioan, tell me what you make of this business with Noname and Jay Electronica. There are some fascinating dynamics at play here, I think. Jay Electronica has been around forever and done a lot of features at this point, and anyone who has spent a significant amount of time listening to Jay Electronica already knows that he is what I now like to call classically woke—as in, you know, hotep stuff—and I feel like the reason this feature has blown up, specifically, is because, unlike so many other collaborators, Noname proudly represents a more modern woke or progressive position. So there’s a cultural and, to some degree, generational clash there. What do you think?
Harvilla: So in one week, “Rich Men North of Richmond” sold 147,000 track downloads, which means, just in case you’ve forgotten how this ancient method of music distribution works, that 147,000 people paid 99 cents apiece to download an MP3 of this song off the internet. That is a ridiculous and you might even say extramusical number for a song whose most remarkable component is this rhyme:
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3
And you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay
For your bags of Fudge Rounds
Wow, this complaint is specific, and not exactly current as culture-war battlegrounds go, but yeah, as the guy himself says, diversity is our strength. Is Oliver Anthony any more authentic in his art and in his beliefs than, say, Travis Scott? Will Taylor Swift bring this guy out on the Eras Tour next week and bring her controversy-free streak to an ignominious end? Are those dogs OK? Maybe none of it matters (as long as the dogs are OK). I agree with you that Oliver Anthony is not a gifted essayist. I agree that “Try That in a Small Town” is far more malevolent in a steakheaded sort of way. (That song has also dropped out of the top 20 already—not exactly a Morgan Wallen–esque display of staying power.) I agree that Luke Combs’s version of “Fast Car” is pretty good and sounded phenomenal while I was getting my ass kicked at cornhole at my family reunion in Pennsylvania coal-mining country. But I get why it irks people that it took Luke Combs to make “Fast Car” a country hit or why it’s irksome that only a Luke Combs type could’ve gotten “Fast Car” onto country radio in the first place.
The great Noname vs. J. Cole dustup of 2020 feels relevant to me, in terms of unpacking why this particular Jay Electronica rumination has raised such a ruckus. I read Craig Jenkins over at Vulture, always, and Craig gets at it in the very first line of his reliably sharp review of Sundial: “Noname occupies a rare space in modern hip-hop, a rapper with a fandom that consistently holds them to the fire about how effectively their political ideals are expressed and acted on in an industry packed with guys who couldn’t lose the adulation of their loyal constituents if they tried.” She’s beloved in large part for her willingness to work out her musical and personal and sociopolitical ideas in public—her slow evolution is central to her lasting appeal. She’s not chasing pop stardom so much as a higher form of enlightenment. Maybe. Arguably. Charitably.
All of which means she’s theoretically supposed to know better, in terms of letting Jay Electronica say Jay Electronica–type shit. That’s a reductive view of both pop music and politics, but I know you know that you’ll never talk pop-music fans out of forming elaborate parasocial and sociopolitical relationships with pop stars, even though those fans should know better, and the pop stars themselves don’t necessarily know better than anyone else. (I hope you never stop trying to talk them out of it, though.) Are you on Noname’s side in this particular fascinating generational dispute? Are you in any sense disappointed by her, or is the whole point to avoid getting too invested and never let pop stars disappoint you at all?
Charity: I think Craig and I view the fan dynamics with Noname from different angles, and I take a darker view. I agree with his characterization to an extent: A lot of other fan bases really do a lot of childish, stan-ish rationalizations of artists (e.g., Drake), and so there is something somewhat admirable about the fact that Noname has cultivated a fan base that’s more comfortable being critical or disagreeable. But I also think that the tail is wagging the dog, so to speak. There’s a version of this story that really is about a young woman embarking on a journey of self-discovery and self-enlightenment and delighting people with the art that she makes along the way. But I think this is a different story. The darker view of Noname is that she came into her own as a solo artist and cultivated her current fan base by making herself a sort of ideological canvas for other people. Where you talk about her “work[ing] out her musical and personal and sociopolitical ideas in public,” the unspoken part of this is that her fan base already has in mind the conclusions it wants her to reach about, well, everything. So Noname is walking a very narrow path, in a sense. And now I get the sense that she’s feeling cornered or getting sick of this dynamic, and that’s why she’s digging her heels in here, writing on IG: “i’m not going to apologize for a verse i didn’t write. i’m not going to apologize for including it on my album. if you feel i’m wrong for including that’s fair. don’t listen. unfollow and support all the other amazing rappers putting out dope music. your disappointment truly means absolutely nothing to me and i say that with love.” She’s not quite defending the unquestionably wild content of Jay Electronica’s verse, I don’t think, so much as she’s trying to claw back some sense of self-determination. She picked a rough hill to die on, in this case. But generally, I think she realizes that she’s written herself, and her exacting fan base, into a corner that isn’t necessarily where she wants to stay forever.
All that said, I’m not especially disappointed in anyone. Setting aside the question of overinvestment in any particular star, I’d say I’m very invested in having hip-hop and other subcultures strike a healthier balance of artists’ authority and fans’ expectations. Who knows why Taylor Swift and Matty Healy broke up, really, but I lost some amount of respect for Taylor when they did, because once you’ve decided that your fan base gets to dictate your dating life, or you at least create the impression that they have this power, you’re essentially Rapunzel. You may be a globe-striding colossus on tour, but you are otherwise a sock puppet for someone else’s ideals and a prisoner of their supra-musical expectations. That doesn’t sound powerful or artful to me. That sounds miserable.
Harvilla: I can think of a few reasons not to date Matty Healy beyond “My fans don’t like him,” but yeah, I get it. And I think Noname gets it too, because I’ve had Sundial on repeat ever since we started talking, and right now, she keeps repeating this:
People say they love you
But they really love potential
Not the person that’s in front of them
The person you’ll grow into
Dark! And also miserable! So through your darker prism, some people love Noname because she represents a less vapid and far more politically engaged vision of post–George Floyd hip-hop, and they’re validated when she raps, “I ain’t fuckin’ with the NFL or Jay-Z / Propaganda for the military complex,” and they’re distraught when she lets Jay Electronica call out “fuckboy 85ers.” Some people love Lizzo, who you brought up forever ago, because she represents a much kinder and more inclusive vision of mass-market pop, and they’re distraught when her backup dancers sue her for allegedly violating those very principles. Pretty much everybody loves Taylor when she’s eviscerating famous narcissists, and they’re distraught, or maybe just grimly amused, when she holds hands with yet another one.
I maintain that our current country music moment—which is to say our current pop-charts moment—is a darker and more explicit example of these sorts of fan dynamics. Lots of people have latched on to a third-tier Jason Aldean song because it protects the mythical small-town idyll they want protected and menaces, or at least offends, the right people along the way. Lots of people latched on to Oliver Anthony—a guy they almost certainly had never heard of two months ago—because he represented the archetypal Working Man in his archetypal fight against the archetypal Rich Man, and he represented the enduring myth of Authentic Music against the enduring myth of Vapid Pop Music. It’s just that compared to Aldean or Wallen, we don’t know nearly as much about what this guy really likes (diversity) or dislikes (Fudge Rounds). We hear Luke Combs sing “Fast Car” on the radio again, and maybe we’re reminded of who gets to dominate country radio and who doesn’t; we hear Morgan Wallen sing “Last Night” on the radio again, and maybe we’re reminded of who gets welcomed back to the country radio fold after a messy public fracas and who won’t be.
I keep looking at this.
Those are the no. 1 songs in America in August. Dark! So my two questions for you are: How much worse is the “pop music as political statement” landscape, really, since you wrote about Taylor Swift and Donald Trump in 2017? And are the pop charts themselves primarily just another culture-war battleground now?
Charity: The charts are a few different things all at once. A platform for the occasional culture-war skirmish, sure, but then also a showcase of the diversification—arguably, to the point of homogenization—of these genres. Jason Aldean may think he’s at war with “urban” culture, but here’s Morgan Wallen singing over trap hi-hats and 808s. American culture is, as always, full of such tensions and apparent contradictions.
