Dispatches From The Mainstream: White Boy Summer
a (relatively) brief review of three (relatively) new songs
Oliver Anthony - “Rich Men North Of Richmond”
Last week, a video of independent country artist Oliver Anthony performing his song “Rich Men North Of Richmond” was posted to YouTube and within a few days it was a massive hit. As of my writing this, the video has 15 million views and is sitting at the top of the Apple Music charts. It has already generated a large amount of discourse and when it enters the Billboard charts this week, most likely at a very high level, it will only generate more. A lot of this discourse has taken the form of a debate over whether or not this is a “right-wing” song, so let’s just go ahead and get this out of the way: yes, of course it is, what the fuck are you talking about?
I understand why people are confused. The song’s most prominent message – the rich and powerful are actively oppressing the rest of us – is blatantly, undeniably true, and it’s nice to imagine a world where we could all unite under that feeling. But the second verse of the song makes that difficult:
I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat
And the obese milkin' welfare
Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
Young men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground
'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them down
On an aesthetic level, this part is disastrous. Anthony’s emotional vocal performance is one of the most immediately striking things about the song, and he sounds pretty damn good when he’s singing about the plight of America’s lower class, but when he uses that same vocal style and mournful melody to deliver a hacky early-90s stand-up bit about welfare queens binging on fudge rounds, it sounds ridiculous. You simply cannot tell me that you feel as powerfully about fudge rounds as you do about class oppression or child sex trafficking. I do not believe you.
The inclusion of this lyrical aside muddies the song’s message in a way that makes it difficult for someone with a left-leaning political sensibility to embrace it. There are two possible explanations for this, and the first one is that Oliver Anthony is stupid. This, admittedly, is the most likely possibility. This country is full of people who have internalized the idea that welfare abuse is rampant, mostly because they’ve been drip-fed that idea their entire life by cable news pundits and overly credulous relatives passing off urban legends as personal experience. What’s that? Your pee-paw once saw a homeless man beg for change on the street all day, then drive away in a brand-new Cadillac? Well, I guess that settles it – poor people need to starve!
The second possibility is that Oliver Anthony is smart, or at least canny and cynical. A protest song about how the rich and powerful are actively oppressing the rest of us would not get traction in the present-day media ecosystem, but a country song that upsets liberals stands a decent chance of it. From this point of view, the incongruous nature of the second verse’s questionable lyrics work to the song’s ultimate advantage: people who are already sympathetic to the song’s point of view can shrug them off as being irrelevant to the song’s larger point, while people who are already wary of the song will hear those lines and understand that they are being turned away. It’s a sneaky use of political signifiers to place the song on one distinct side of the political divide while pretending that’s not what’s happening.
The end result of all this is that a song that could’ve spoken to universal feelings among people in this country gets turned into grist for the endlessly churning mill that we call “the national conversation.” Of course, the real irony here is that the myth of welfare abuse is a trope deployed by liberals as often as it is by conservatives. Liberals will do it in a gentler, more sympathetic tone, but the goal from both sides is the same: the preservation of an unjust and evil system that engenders human suffering on a massive scale. Sure would be nice if someone were to write a song about that.
Post Malone - “Mourning”
All human beings have a drive towards self-destruction within them. Some people have it to higher degrees than others, but it’s always present at some level. This presents a problem, in that most of us do not want to actually destroy ourselves. Art is the most reliable tool we have for resolving this contradiction, and for a long time, the rock star was our most reliable cultural figure for helping us manage that resolution.
By the time I came on the scene, rock was all but spent as a cultural force, and the closest thing we had to rock stars was big-name rappers. Writing this in the year of the Eras Tour, when it has become clear that Taylor Swift is the most powerful musical avatar of our time, I am keenly aware that the balance is once again shifting, but I can only speak the truth of my own soul, and in my soul, it is still 2005 and it always will be.
This is why I love Post Malone. Post Malone occupies a liminal space between old-school rock-star (tattoos, bad hair, alcoholism) and present-day rapper (gold teeth, boring songs about how sad he is, pill addiction), while he has spent his musical career walking the line between these two worlds, his dedication to upholding the ideals of self-destruction put him squarely in the rock-star camp. Hip-hop is ultimately about survival and endurance, moving from a bad situation into a good one through sheer force of will. Rock – at least the kind I’m talking about – is about getting to that place and destroying yourself out of either boredom or desperation.
Admittedly, Post Malone jumped the gun on this a little when he included a song on his second album called “Rich & Sad,” but you can’t say he’s not dedicated to the bit. His third album stayed the course and even included a collaboration with Ozzy Osbourne himself, the High Priest of Self Destruction. But it was Post Malone’s 2022 album Twelve Carat Toothache that really cemented his status as heir to Ozzy’s title. Despite the fact that it was promoted with three singles that were on-trend and generally up-tempo, the album itself is one of the bleaker things I’ve heard from a pop star. The very first words you hear on the album are Post Malone singing the refrain “take my own life just to save yours,” and the same song includes the lyrics “kill myself today” and “I was born to fuck up/I was born/What a shame.” Halfway through the album, he drops a song called “Euthanasia” where he explicitly compares his everyday lifestyle to a long-term assisted suicide, and then the whole album ends with a demo of that same song. He really wanted people to know how fucked up he was.
One can question the sincerity of all this – after all, could a person who is that fucked up actually continue to perform the duties of a major-label pop star? But it doesn’t matter whether or not Post Malone himself is literally engaging in self-destructive behavior; what matters is that he makes music that touches the self-destructive heart of his listeners. On “Mourning,” Post Malone speaks directly to that dark part of all of us, but unlike most of the songs on Twelve Carat Toothache, “Mourning” is also enjoyable to listen to, even as Post Malone documents a life that sounds absolutely soul-crushing. Over the course of “Mourning,” Post spends $100k at a fancy wine store, downs thirty High Noons at a party, and ends up vomiting on the floor of a stranger’s house while loudly talking to a person who isn’t there. He also throws an empty bottle of alcohol at the sky in open defiance of God’s authority, which is an ineffective but pretty hilarious move.
My favorite part, though, comes at the end of the hook, when Post sings “Got a lot of shit to say, couldn’t fit it in the chorus.” This doesn’t have anything to do with self-destruction, but I do find it pretty relatable. Sometimes it’s hard to communicate all the thoughts you have on a subject while working effectively within your chosen form. The genius of Post Malone is that he found a way to put that idea into the song itself – although one does have to wonder if he’d have more room for his other thoughts if he’d left it out.
Dermot Kennedy - “Don’t Forget Me”
I spent a lot of time last month driving around the Atlantic Archipelago listening to FM radio, which means I had a higher level of exposure to Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy in those four weeks than in the entire rest of my life combined. When I first heard “Giants,” I mistook it as the latest from Scotland’s own Lewis Capaldi, and I considered it a major artistic improvement. Finally, I thought, Lewis Capaldi has realized that he has a voice for propulsive, high-energy numbers, not soulful, Adele-style piano ballads. If only we were so lucky.
I was actually in Edinburgh when Dermot Kennedy played a show at the Edinburgh Castle, a 900-year-old structure that also doubles as a music venue for some reason. The castle stands on Castle Rock, a volcanic plug that towers nearly 300 feet above the surrounding landscape and has been occupied for so long that no one’s entirely sure when people first settled on it. From an archeological perspective, this is fascinating – for my purposes, it meant that my wife and I spent one of our evenings in Edinburgh listening to Dermot Kennedy’s music echo across the landscape. It is beyond me why the people of Scotland would allow their most beautiful city to be defiled in such a way – and by an Irishman, no less!
I won’t mince words here: “Don’t Forget Me” has one of the worst choruses of all time. If I was being charitable, I would say that it is merely the least relatable chorus of all time, but for a pop song, that’s basically the same thing. It’s not the sort of chorus that would necessarily stand out to a casual listener as exceptionally bad. The entire song is competently produced, with Kennedy’s warbling voice floating above a generically tasteful piano line in the verses before the chorus explodes into glitchy drums and booming backup vocals. It is not far removed from the music that Lewis Capaldi continues to produce against all sense and reason. But while Lewis Capaldi proudly puts his awful lyrical conceits front and center, Kennedy’s song initially scans as pretty unremarkable, until you take a closer look at the chorus:
I get this feeling like I'm fading from your memory
So I wrote this song and called it "Don't Forget Me"
In a pop song like this, the chorus is what the song is about, which makes this a song about Dermot Kennedy writing the song that you’re currently listening to. I’m not against self-referential songwriting – see my comments above regarding Post Malone – but this thing is a goddamn ouroboros. The lyrics are so recursive that no one alive except for Dermot Kennedy himself can relate to the emotions being expressed. It’s not about longing for someone or even writing a song for someone, it’s about Dermot Kennedy specifically writing this song for a specific person. And once you have that in mind, the rest of the chorus seems a little clingy:
Every time you hear it will you smile?
And tell the one you're with I was that guy?
Even though you had to let me go
Don't forget me
This is a more significant imposition than a simple request that someone keep you in their mind. Kennedy wants this person to stop whenever they hear this song and turn to the person they’re with – presumably a new romantic partner – and say, “Hey, I used to fuck this guy.” It gets even worse when you reach the bridge, which strongly implies that this wasn’t even someone that Kennedy was in a relationship with, it was someone he had sex with once.
That one night, it was so right
You were all mine
How could we let it go?
That one night was my whole life
And we stopped time
How could we let it go?
Ironically, all this leads me to one question: what the fuck was Dermot Kennedy thinking when he wrote this song? And honestly, that’s an achievement. How many artists could write an entire song about the process of writing a song and still leave you with more questions than answers? It’s that sort of Irish trickery that the people of Scotland would do well to learn from – Lewis Capaldi most of all.