Why Oliver Anthony Hates Welfare

There is a journey you take the first time you see Oliver Anthony sing “Rich Men North of Richmond.” For a half-second, you take in this pink-skinned, russet-bearded man in his wooded seclusion. If you are an American, that is all the time it takes to classify him. He is the silent majority, he is the forgotten man. Moreover, he is a hick and a cracker and all the things that go along with being that. Then a cry of complaint and generations-deep sorrow issues from behind his buck teeth, and your heart swells, and your hair stands on end. As he sings of “wasting his life away” for “bullshit pay,” and what a “damn shame” it is ​“what the world’s gotten to for people like me and people like you,” you think, yes, yes. By the time the chorus arrives you are ready to fight by his side in any revolution.