Posted on 08/18/2023 1:52:18 AM PDT by spirited irish
It has been a long time since I heard a song that produced such a visceral reaction for me. I am blown away. No matter how many times I listen, it punches me in the gut every time. I can hear his voice, but I can feel the emotions behind the words even more. He is singing from his soul, and during these few moments I can feel his Blues, his raw emotion in my bones. I think we all know this, we just mostly choose to ignore it. If we continue, it is at our own peril. We are headed toward a destination were no one will be willing to speak to each other, and we are getting closer every day. Songs like this are needed, songs with meaning and purpose!
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
I am glad you don’t have a ‘b’ wife. The ‘a’ wife might bet jealous. 😉
Musically, it’s a bit overly simple but lyrically it’s pretty intense. A careful listen suggests it’s not really a cohesive message, the writer is simply pissed off about a lot of different things.
I love it and l love how it came out of nowhere and topped the charts.
What they fear and hate is that Anthony is the living truth of who and what the Left, Luciferian Dems, and their fellowship of darkness really are and what they've deliberately done to destroy our land and our people. It's their own evil image they hate and fear---because it's really true.
Got it. Thanks for clarifying.
If you go back to YouTube there are reaction videos. Hundreds from blacks as well. There are also some from foreign countries. Nearly every one is laudatory, the comments at each one are nearly universally supportive. This is the platform why very many receive their news, and everyone can put themselves into the lyrics. Hoping some eyes are opened…
Trump should loudly promise to release the client list, regardless of the consequences.
Excellent post. I’ve forwarded it to a few of my muscian friends.
We need to get more musicians creating original music and getting it out to the masses.
Don't need record companies for that anymore.
A few of my friends have gone the independent route, and for a while now, via Spotify, You Tube, and the rest. There are more channels for marketing music than ever before. And yes you are quite correct about the record companies (bunch of leaches). It is not easy to break through in music, but Oliver Anthony has done it, and proven that it can be done.
I must confess that I haven’t listened to his tune yet, due being a hard core jazz guy with a visceral aversion to both “Country and Western” music, although I have read the words, and agree with what he wrote.
I should also point out, that I think this song is meh. If the lyrics were some pro-left wing Antifa nonsense, we’d be trashing it and calling it out as tripe. But I applaud the DIY spirit and the sentiment in the lyrics.
Rock" today sounds like "pop" from yesterday, and most "metal" today sound like trash (except for Mesuggah). Most instrumental, guitar driven rock today (no lyrics = no stupidity) is more dense and technical than yesterday, but is more powerful and brutal.
As I rant from time to time, there IS great new music. I go to Bandcamp to find new music. What the Sony et al want us to think is good, sucks bigly. Bandcamp has a searchable front end where you can find quality, unsigned new music in whatever genre you want.
Going further, commerce works. Get off yer assez, go out to a bar/club, plunk down $10 for a cover charge and hear 4 bands play their guts out. Two bands will suck. One will be ok. But then you'll find that one band that blows your socks off, and renews your hope in youth and humanity...you just then buy their merch because capitalism.
All of this, in some way, is a nod to what Zappa said in 1988:
Q: Do you think that's a reason why guitar is becoming less of a prominent instrument in pop today? Do you think other people are experiencing what you're experiencing?
FZ: Well, pop music is not the end of the world. There's a whole substructure of what they call pop music which is heavy metal, in which the guitar rules. And that's never going to change. That's a style that's probably going to be with us until hell freezes over, to use a rock and roll term. But if you're talking about Whitney Houston, that other kind of pop music, they try to keep those blasphemous elements out of it. There's nothing AOR or MOR about a fuzz-tone guitar. They try to make the orchestration on those songs as neutral and comfortable as possible. And I think the listening public is, to a certain extent, deceived by what is broadcast. Because what is broadcast is not necessarily an accurate indication of what people are writing or recording. Now, what usually goes on the radio is the most banal product that every record company can manage to put together. In the United States, radio truly is a cultural embarrassment. The only creative radio you can listen to is what they call shock radio, where people are talking and making things up. There's a little spark of creativity there. But most of the music that's broadcast is harmful to your mental health.
Certainly he lacks any semblance of studio polish as he's basically been recording acoustic songs out in his front yard and posting them to the Internet.
Does remind me of the early Bob Dylan, before he went electric and started touring with a full scale rock band. Dylan's earliest songs were very stark and stripped down, mostly based on old folk songs. Instead of his front yard, Dylan sang in tiny coffeehouses in Greenwich Village and in people's living rooms. Some may argue that Dylan's voice never improved since those early days, but I digress.
Oliver Anthony does not seem to be going down as a one-hit wonder. As of right now, he has placed twenty songs in the iTunes Top 100 Country chart. He is basically occupying one fifth of the entire chart, displacing established country artists like Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen, and Chris Stapleton. That's not even including the new song he dropped yesterday "I Want To Go Home."
If it was just the one song, "Rich Men North of Richmond", he could more easily be dismissed as one who just got lucky with the right song at the right time.
Now maybe by the time the autumn leaves fall, this whole phenomenon evaporates into thin air and Oliver Anthony becomes nothing more than a trivia question.
I think he has staying power, especially if he gets into a studio and puts some polish on his works, but time will tell.
Good read. Zappa was a very interesting guy. He knew his stuff. Technically the music he made was very well done. What he lacked was the intangible “likability”element. You cannot learn that, you have it or you don’t. Which is not to say l didn’t like anything he did. I liked some of it.
By now, it’s all been done, and the audio quality has been good enough for enough time that it gets harder to know if a song was made today, or 5, 10, 20 years ago.
Pop/Rock has pretty much reached the lifecycle phase that Classical Music has. People just listen to the classics and aren’t really interested in hearing any of the new stuff that comes out.
The “Top 40” stuff is disposable and largely forgotten in a few months.
“it’s not really a cohesive message”
I have not even heard the song—saw the lyrics for the first time on this thread.
I thought it was very cohesive—even brilliant.
The DC Cabal is stomping on the common folks.
That is the message.
You are right for the most part, especially when it comes to contemporary pop/“top 40” stuff. You could use AI to make it. Anyone with a good auto tune right and drum machine can turn that stuff out. Thankfully there are exceptions like Joe Bonamassa or Steve Earl who can get to done but not many others.
I’m not saying good new music can’t be made, it’s just not going to break any new ground.
You may be right, but to quote from an old Pet Shop Boys song: “just when you least expect it, the thing that you least expect”.
While I actively avoid country music, I’m totally comfortable with un-electrified music. A guy or a gal with a guitar or piano and singing, that can work with me. Ironically, I have the XM bluegrass channel on my favorites.
Basically, Anthony’s song makes me go “well…ok…” I find the tune to be rather so-so, I think the lyrics are crafted and refined to obtain maximum conservative triggering and not really heartfelt (though I love the message), and the video seems so affected.
Now, I heard Anthony’s back story and it think he’s sincere. So it’s not about the man, and I really hope he fires his management.
In situations like this, I move things around: if his lyrics were all MSNBC-like, I’d outright hate the song. That clinches it for me. Instead of this being Socialist Realism, it’s Deplorable Realism.
I really WANT to like the song. I simply would rather listen to a zillion other things. But I’ll take the cultural Win.
We take you now to a garage in Canoga Park.
[it makes it’s own sauce… if you add water]
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