Oliver Anthony, then, is not new. He fits easily into Country’s long history, singing about ordinary life and ordinary feelings. Take a look at Anthony’s other songs. “Now some people write songs on livin’ just right,” he sings in “I’ve Got to Get Sober”. “But I write mine on just getting by.” This is what Country music has always been. In Tanya Tucker’s “Two Sparrows in a Hurricane”, she sings: “There’s a baby crying and one more on the way / There’s a wolf at the door / With a big stack of bills they can’t pay.” Or take Anthony’s “I Want to go Home”: “Seven generations farming the ground / Grandson sells it to a man from out of town / Two weeks later, the trees go down / Only got concrete growing around.” Again, this is both deep Americana and universal. It could be the lament of the Dutch Farmer Citizen Movement — or Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”: “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” Anthony is singing about the things people always worry about, only in a contemporary manner: “an old soul in a new world”, as he puts it.
His success, then, is surely down to the way he so obviously reflects the real world — he is a mirror of the zeitgeist, not a creator of it. “I’ve been selling my soul, working all day,” he sings with evident emotion. “Overtime hours for bullshit pay.” In both the United States and Britain this is just plainly true. Since 1979, the top 1% in the US have seen their wages grow by 138%, while wages for the bottom 90% grew by just 15%. In Britain, living standards have been stagnant since 2007. Why shouldn’t people rage against these failing systems?
Like Country itself, Anthony is both à la mode and old-fashioned, conservative and anti-establishment, provincial and universal. He has very obviously grown out of the soil that gave us Trump and Brexit, and now RFK Jr. What makes his music doubly powerful is the fact that much of today’s Country is as corporate and safe as everything else, churning out endless cheesy songs about love and small-town life that often meld into pop and rock, only with twangier sounds and romantic deviations into faith and family.
In early Country music, songwriters gazed deep into the heartbreaking reality of life as it was back then, singing about everything from dead babies to dead dogs. In Johnny Cash’s recording of “The Engineer’s Dying Child”, for example, he sings about a railwayman whose child is sick but he has to go to work. Before he sets off, he tells his wife: “Just hang a light when I pass tonight, Hang it so it can be seen / If the baby’s dead, then show the red / If it’s better, then show the green.”
Today, Country music is far more sanitised, in large part because life itself is more sanitised — or, in other words, better. Our lives today tend not to be touched by quite as much tragedy. Child mortality is rare, so too deadly disease. Even our pets live longer. Very few of us face such an unimaginable scene as the railway man in Cash’s song. And the result is that Country music has become more generic. “Modern country music speaks less of such desperate loss and has become shiny and rich and rather shallow as a result,” Cash’s daughter Rosanne reflects in her memoir, Composed. “The dead have all but disappeared, though they do occasionally surface. The family has likewise faded in country, as sexual heat has begun to obsess most singers and songwriters, just as it does in pop music.”
And yet, there are more modern emotions than heartbreak and sexual attraction. Tragedy and pain and poverty still exist: drug abuse, family breakdown, death and disease. And so does the sense of political and economic powerlessness, as Anthony’s “Rich Men” proves. Country music is born to express this frustration: “Music about people who thought their stories were not being told,” as Burns put it.
To me, Anthony is proof of the continued vibrancy and diversity of American culture, something that seems lacking in Britain today. We have many of the same conditions as the US: regional poverty, terrible wages, cultural dislocation. Compared to America — and even those parts of America where Anthony lives — Britain is poorer with worse wages. We have millions of people living far from the capital who feel that their instincts and beliefs are ignored by those in positions of power. Where is the music that tells their story, that reflects their rage?
We have Oasis and Blur, Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers, each of whom touch on the ordinary lives of ordinary people in their stories, but not quite in the same way. In Oasis’s “Cigarettes and Alcohol”, there is a lament about modern life equivalent to Anthony’s: “Is it worth the aggravation / To find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for? / It’s a crazy situation / But all I need are cigarettes and alcohol.” In Jake Bugg’s “Trouble Town”, he’s stuck in his home town where “all you’ve got’s your benefits; And you’re barely scraping by”. There are plenty of songs which could be Country ballads: The Streets’ “Dry Your Eyes”, even The Spice Girls’ “Mama”.
There is anger in modern British music too of course. Casting around for examples to disprove my lament about the lack of Oliver Anthony-style rage in Britain, alternatives were offered — from bands like IDLES and Sleaford Mods to Stormzy. In each case it’s reasonable to argue that they meet Burns’s definition of Country music, telling the stories of those who do not otherwise get their stories told. And yet, taken together, they still do not amount to a genre of their own. The rage in modern British music is more diverse and scattered — and often metropolitan. Grime, for example, is still a predominantly London genre, not the music of provincial “left behind”. Where is the music that connects the Red Wall and Great Yarmouth, Morecambe and Boston — the places that helped give us Brexit and Boris (and Blair, of course)?
The truth is we do not have the same vibrant, distinctive tradition of provincial British music as a genre of its own. In part, I think, this represents the total domination of London in our national life as well as our own cultural norms. In Britain, you don’t revere your town, you mock it (even if that is really a particularly British form of self-effacing affection); you don’t wear your heart on your sleeve, share your pain, or give away your feelings. You don’t rage against life; you quietly grumble.
But also, I don’t think you rage against London — you move there. In Britain, we don’t have alternative centres of commerce or culture. London is our New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Nashville. If you make it somewhere else, you move to London — or, indeed, the US. The Arctic Monkeys swapped Sheffield for California, the Gallaghers traded Manchester for London. In Bugg’s “Trouble Town”, he is “stuck in speed bump city / Where the only thing that’s pretty / Is the thought of getting out”.
The irony, of course, is that we are so dominated by the rich men of the South East that we’re not even able to produce a vibrant cultural alternative. Instead of producing our own Country music, we import it. Today, Americana seems to be more popular than ever. The annual festival of all things Country in London — Country to Country — is regularly sold out. The biggest Country stars now regularly pass through London: Luke Combs, Shania Twain, Ashley McBryde, Maren Morris. There is clearly an appetite for what Country is selling, even if what it is selling is distinctively American.
But here’s the problem: rather than mock Oliver Anthony and the redneck America he represents, then, we should worry about why our docile culture so dominated by one all-encompassing city does not produce enough Oliver Anthonys of our own. We have bailed out the banks, imposed austerity, left large swathes of the country impoverished and imposed a trade border within our own country; corporate profits have gone up while living standards have gone down, and the state seems barely capable of doing anything but the most basic of public service provision. The country is a mess. We have channelled our fury about the situation into political rebellion, but what about cultural rebellion? We deserve more populist fury than we’ve got. Where is it?
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