TL has a look in.
It’s the government in Washington DC that’s turned on all of America, taxing us out of our budgets, inflating our grocery store intake down to a minimum, frustrating our efforts to get ahead with regulations and green energy initiatives that only demand more taxes while also increasing our per hour cost of electricity. The future is even more depressing. Suicides are up at the same time as excess mortality. When we aren’t killing ourselves, they’re doing it for us with vaxx mandates and wave upon wave of Executive Order assaults on our freedoms and financial liberty.
Oliver Anthony (Chris) simply expresses everything I’ve written for the last decade in a three minute song of frustration, but what does Rolling Stone focus on? The mention of obese people milking welfare and Epstein’s island, hoping that the reader will then vilify Anthony and drive him out of the limelight before people start to recognize the true villains in our lives are not our neighbors, but the Rich Men North of Richmond.
Anthony has so far refused the music industry’s attempt to co-opt his music, turning down an eight million dollar offer and I hope he refrains, because I know that accepting the offer would be akin to giving up the voice that has garnered his success. They will quickly edit out such honest lines about welfare and pedophilia and turn him into the type of artist I haven’t been able to listen to for more than 20 years, because it’s dull, lifeless, emotionless, but with all the right hooks and gimmicks to get one to sing along.
Anthony brings soul and pain when he brings out a song. That’s what made Country music my favorite when it was sung by the likes of Haggard, Cash, either Hank Williams and Waylon. Their songs felt like they’d been there, suffered that, dealt with it in inappropriate ways, perhaps, but lived it, lived life, felt life, they didn’t just go from day to day stumbling along. They provided inspiration or a vent for frustration. Their songs could be guidance in a dark time, because they came from someone who had suffered the same.
If Oliver Anthony recognizes he can make all the money he needs by remaining independent and singing about what matters to him and the rest of us, he will inspire a resurgence of the protest anthem song that beats in the heart of every American right now. There’s so much wrong and so much pain in this nation and the people need to express it, use it to make change, drive the Rich Men North of Richmond out of our lives.
A-fuggin’-MEN to that. Meanwhile, the spontaneous groundswell of support from millions of much-put-upon and abused Real Americans just goes on a-building, with even dreadlocked white rappers now expressing their own fed-up-itude with the intolerable stolen-nation status quo.
You all know that I will never be mistaken for any kind of fan of the rap crap, but the lyrics to this one are actually pretty good, I think. “It’s not your America”? Damned right it ain’t, Rich Men North North of Richmond. Unfortunately for you and your Enemies, Domestic ilk, it looks more and more as if millions of us are just about ready to take it back from you again.
Maybe this one really is just an attempt at cashing in on a trend; I can’t say, and won’t speculate. But in the end, it isn’t going to matter; as I said in a comment over at Sido’s joint last week:
Songs have a funny way, once they’ve been released into the wild and have gotten loose (so to speak), of ricocheting off in all sorts of directions, almost none of which were ever even imagined by the people who wrote them. At that point, it’s beyond control; people will make of them whatever they will, no input from the original creator either asked for or welcome.
Ask me how I know. 😉
S’truth, folks. How many times have I spoken with a fan after a show, and he/she would be gushing on about how my lyrics had really touched them deep down, the meaning behind them being this, that, or the other thing—none of which I had even remotely had in mind when I wrote the blasted thing. It made me ask a few times if we were even talking about the same damned song, because if we were I sure couldn’t tell. Music wants to be free, untrammeled and unpredictable, regardless of its original source and/or the intentions of its creators, and it will always find a way to get there.
Update! Yep, there’s definitely something happenin’ here.
See what I mean about the innate tendency of music to take on a life all its own? I’m pretty sure the conventional, Mark-1 Mod-0 Lefty hippies in Buffalo Springfield never dreamed that their anti-Vietnam War protest anthem would one day become so profoundly relevant to the bizarre idea of millions of Real Americans rising up to throw off the shackles of the (Lefty) Man. Duuude, it’s mind-blowing!
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- Entries
“A-fuggin’-MEN to that.”
Ditto x 1000
No fan of rap either, but than one passes and I like it.
They Need Us. We Don’t Need Them.
“You denounce us as ignorant, as racists, as homophobes or transphobes, or whatever the pejorative of the day is. You look down your noses at people who never went to college, who work in the trades. But you of the left should remember one thing: You need us. We don’t need you.
You deride the people who live out in the woods, on farms, or in small towns in the hinterlands, but we are the people who grow your food. We are the ones who harvest lumber and quarry stone and gravel for concrete, all of the materials that go into building your homes. And remember: You need us. We don’t need you.
You look down your nose at the people who transport you. People like the thousands who work in the plants of Ford, GM, Chrysler, and the other various manufacturers all around the country. The people who refine the gasoline and diesel fuel that move the vehicles, the people who fix your car when it breaks down, the driver of the wrecker who comes out to help you because you lack the skills to do something as elementary as changing a tire – a skill I learned at about ten years of age. And remember: You need us. We don’t need you.”
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2023/08/20/they-need-us-we-dont-need-them-n2162842
I like some of the earliest rap. Creative and different.
It soon became predictable and repetitive and its appeal was obviously directed at thugs and their lifestyle in the Urban Warzones.
It’s chief problem is its lack of melody (not complete absence, but its simple rhyming and steady rhythms don’t allow for melodic development) and it requires some level of ability to be Poetic. For the most part though it is NEITHER Louie Louie and Twist and Shout and 96 Teardrops NOR is it Dylan and Fagen/Becker and Paul Simon.