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.
We take you now to a garage in Canoga Park.
[it makes it’s own sauce… if you add water]