The Whinges of Whiteness

I’m not in the habit of annotating pop culture, or viral fads in their ephemerality—one can only say so much without love. But there’s something morbidly fascinating about the overnight success of doggy dad and would-be troubadour Oliver Anthony’s ‘Rich Men North of Richmond,’ and the rush from the right to celebrate the singer’s lightly conspiratorial worldview and untouched authenticity—as if some random, malcontented man on the land had simply stumbled into a music video shoot, guitar in hand, ready to opine freely on forces beyond his ken.

‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ is only the latest in this year’s succession of pre-fab right-wing propaganda songs, recruiting clicks from knee-jerk opinion and galvanizing ranks of common-sense reactionaries. In sequence, the song’s pseudo-woodsy airs contrast the studio sheen of Jason Aldean’s shithead anthem, ‘Try That In A Small Town’—an apparent paean to past chivalry, shored in the right of the propertied to lynching and vigilantism. Aldean’s marketing plan pursues an easily foreseeable controversy, culminating in a folksy, flummoxed statement from the singer himself: “My political views have never been something I’ve hidden from,” Aldean posted in the wake of his video’s polarized reception—offering an incidentally breathtaking description of so-called empirical consciousness and the workings of ideology.

Aldean’s slickly packaged revenge fantasy runs to extremes of insinuation, while Anthony’s modest production is supposed to gloss the view from an Appalachian Anywhere. Anthony, like Aldean the week before, sings for country music’s target constituency, the “white working class,” but with an indie whinge in place of his counterpart’s auto-tuned twang. Never mind the distance from outlaw to lawful country; from an artistic standpoint, the real upset here is the wish of some schlock-inoculated critics to claim backwoods authenticity for an inverted version of the folk-punk busker, minus buttflap. (There’s a longer comparison to be made here, but between poser hobo and po-mo hoser, I choose death.)

Dozens of articles have appeared online this week comparing and contrasting these two songs specifically, and I don’t have much to add to those think-pieces. As concerns the more intimate appeal of ‘Rich Men North of Richmond,’ many commentators are content to speak of a right-wing monopoly on loneliness—as talking point, recruitment site, or skipping several steps, an uninterpreted cause of political ressentiment—without much thought as to the specific desires that draw lone men toward proto-fascist fantasies of strength. But the re-masculinization of the creep by class descent is another essay altogether. This seems to be happening everywhere—my little punk scene has skinheads again, which I can only read as a reaction to, rather than a facet of, its relatively new accessibility and diversity.

Whatever else you’ve heard, ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ is a poor excuse for a working person’s anthem—most obviously because of its substitution of welfare recipients for politicians, CEOs, and other parasites of surplus value. This class collaborationist canard furnishes the song its pretext, where the “rich men” in DC are euphemized by shiftless poor. “I wish politicians would look out for miners and not just minors on an island somewhere,” Anthony sings: “Lord, we got folks in the street ain't got nothing to eat and the obese milkin’ welfare.”

A few unhelpful commentators have attempted to defend this scapegoating as the view from uninterpreted desperation, although unsolicited displays of moral disgust at figures of dependency are as old as American capitalism itself. The ‘welfare queen’ trope recurs throughout country music, though Anthony’s lyric is less clever than Buck Owens and less outrageous than Guy Drake, as well as hardcore punk and other self-consciously blue collar songbooks. In 1986, Agnostic Front released ‘Public Assistance,’ a Pete Steele-penned screed against welfare recipients that proposes to make minorities clean the sewers. There’s yet another, separate essay to be written on New York hardcore’s fiscal moralism as a mirror of Koch-era austerity, including contributions from Antidote, Sick Of It All, and Murphy’s Law, but I digress. (There’s likely something in CWL’s recent piece for CVLT Nation.)

Needless to say, proletarian disparagement of social assistance is a production of the ruling class; based on a misperception of the mechanics of capitalist administration, where welfare, like any state paycheque, is advanced by labour only insofar as “the state has no other sources of taxation than capitalist surplus value and wages.” In no sense does this weak redistributionism, supporting the surplus population at subsistence levels, stand in antagonistic relation to labour. But simple education notwithstanding, the cultural dimension of this distinctly American sticking point must be severely scrutinized.

M. Jacqui Alexander speaks of the “blackening” of welfare in the neoliberal era; and in the late 1980s, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke won his seat in the Louisiana senate after a stream of vicious invective against welfare recipients, whom he proposed to sterilize and otherwise sequester. In his 1992 bid for president, Duke further elaborated upon this greatest of social ills, which he characterized as “the biggest drag on our economy.” Over the course of his many campaigns, Duke would advance his barely concealed race hatred under the banner of economic conservatism, scaremongering around the allegedly louche proclivities of a “massive welfare underclass” that, in his view, are the effective beneficiaries of a wealth transfer from working “Americans,” presumed or preferably white.

Race is baked into the conservative position against welfare, which plays on a distinction between the virtues of hard-earned pay and slothful subsistence as it draws on the early racial ideology of the United States, formalized amid commingling modes of production. In this social formation, so-called free labour is uneasily distinguished from slavery by various, and hardly irrevocable, racial insignia—such that the “white working class” is an unstable class consultancy forged in racist contradistinction before it assumes any empirical substance. Historian David Roediger describes the emergence of white national identity in the era of slavery, during which “the white working class, disciplined and made anxious by fear of dependency, began during its formation to construct an image of the Black population as 'other'—as embodying the preindustrial, erotic, careless style of life the white worker hated and longed for.”

In Roediger’s account, fear of the slave displaces fear of slavery, simultaneously perceived as loss of freedom and an unearned keep. These terms are barely transformed in Duke’s campaign polemics against “welfare illegitimacy,” which only become more forthrightly racist once he abandons his quest for office and returns to the fascist grassroots. Today, a bearded kid bleeding on at length about the “obese milking welfare” stands perfectly in line with this and many other precedents. “Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds,” Anthony sings, and many listeners have raised an eyebrow at this strange choice of confection—virtually the only clear image in the whole moralizing lyric. But the arbitrariness is to the point, where Anthony substitutes this sign for an unsayable equivalent: Duke and his ideological kind would typically inveigh against the appetitive poor with reference to illegal drugs and feckless consumerism, but Little Debbie does as well.

Tropes have histories; so to observe that Anthony’s apostrophes are lobbed at the self-understanding of the white working class needn’t suggest any meekly empirical assessment of his listenership; rather, we should note how his rhetoric participates in the present-day recreation of this ideological subgrouping. When conservative apologists speak of Anthony’s lyric as a successful appeal to one working class constituency among others, they miss the dynamic and oppositional nature of group formation in general, and of class collaboration specifically. The problem with ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ isn’t that it seems to have been written by a white person, about the somewhat mystified concerns of other white people. We could say that about a lot of music, from Taylor Swift to Bruce Springsteen. The problem is that the song’s rhetoric actually consolidates the fickle, fictive special interest called whiteness. “It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to for people like me and people like you,” Anthony sings, and all signs suggest that the eligible listener ought to refuse this interpellation.

None of this is to say that the ambivalent plight of the white worker in the south can’t be depicted with sensitivity in song. This month we lost the great Robbie Robertson, whose much-covered classic ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ offers a first-person account of traumatic social transition from the perspective of a white southerner, with only a second-hand and exploited stake in the system of relations whereunder he ekes out a living. Above all else this is an anti-war anthem, sung from a subjectively powerless, and fatefully proud, perspective.

To Anthony’s solicitude of miners, we might sensibly reply with Hazel Dickens’ haunting, a cappella ballad ‘Black Lung’—a bitter picture of her family vocation in the coalfields of Appalachia, in which the threat of dependency figures very differently indeed:

He went to the boss man but he closed the door
Well, it seems you're not wanted when you're sick and you're poor
You ain't even covered in their medical plans
And your life depends on the favours of man …

This is a far cry from the vision of ‘Rich Men North of Richmond,’ in style, substance, and society; where Anthony’s unneighbourly anthem flouts the unwanted and the poor, even proposing to revoke what little favour they receive. I don’t doubt the sincerity of his resentment; but I absolutely hate the implication that we have to listen.