Refusing to partake in the Endless Internet Machine

Oliver Anthony’s country-populist song “Rich Men North of Richmond” has gone viral. That seems to be the most notable thing about the song itself, judging from most of the commentary surrounding it. Every tweet and writeup about it declares the same thing: “This song is going viral!” That’s the extent to which anybody seems to care about it. But that’s really not surprising: The song is at turns silly, trite, boring, self-aware and uninteresting. It sucks. That is a shame, because Oliver Anthony himself has a beautiful country man’s voice, haunting and rich, like Roy Acuff with a raw and wounded edge. He’ll do great things some day, maybe.

This song is not it, however. It is not a good song. That’s because it’s a part of what we might call the Endless Internet Machine, just another link in the decades-long chain of Internet media—“content,” as the marketing guys call it these days—that ultimately functions only as a sort of meta-referential commentary on itself. It’s just pure Internet, just awash in lazy online tropes and conventions. This is a country song that unironically makes a Jeffrey Epstein pedophile reference; it castigates our moneyed overlords while at the same time castigating morbidly obese poor people who use “welfare” to buy “fudge rounds;” it’s a song that snarls about “rich men” who want to “know what you think / and know what you do” and yet it debuted on the video-sharing service of Google, the most potent and uncompromising know-what-you-think-and-do machine ever devised by rich men. It is tonally incoherent and incomprehensible; the inescapable conclusion is that it was devised to be a “viral” phenomenon and nothing more.

Perhaps more than anything, the Endless Internet Machine is defined by “virality.” These are things meant to be very briefly popular, something people can post on their social media feeds while writing “I am OBSESSED with this song,” a cultural artifact you’re just supposed to click on and consume in a passive, bovine-like sort of way before never thinking about again. Virality demands provocative and incendiary content, but it also demands that the content never presses you too hard, that your intellect is never taxed too deeply, that you never think about whatever it is you’re watching or reading at any meaningful length. People who linger too long on something, who reflect on it and ponder it at any depth, are being prevented from finding the next thing to be OBSESSED over, and that simply can’t be allowed.

For instance: Part of this song’s viral appeal is allegedly because it demonstrates, as one commentator claimed, that there’s “a massive undercurrent of populist government hating Americans” who are eager for this kind of affirming music. Ha ha, seriously? That is false. Look at it this way: The singer complains in this song that the average worker’s income is “taxed to no end,” which is true, but of course the only way to reverse that trend is to instigate a massive, relentless drawdown of federal entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. You’re simply not going to convince rural America to go along with that; poor country folk surely make up a disproportionate share of the vast majority of Americans who, when polled, say they do not favor cuts to either of those programs. Who is this song meant for, exactly?

The answer is obvious: It’s meant for the Endless Internet Machine. It is not meant to be a “song” in the traditional sense, or even in the narrow political sense by which protest anthems are often measured. It is meant to be a meme, a low-thought Internet nugget for people to quickly consume, to tweet, and then to forget about. It is not meant to gratify your thirst for artistic pleasure or to deepen your intellectual modalities or to enrich your life in any real way. Ironically the only people it will enrich, aside from briefly Anthony Oliver himself, are the “rich men” he so cynically upbraids.

The solution is, as ever: Get off social media. Get a life. Put down your phone. Close your laptop. Get off the Internet. Well, after you’re doing reading this, anyway.