What "Rich Men North of Richmond" Gets Wrong

An unlikely song recently landed in the #1 spot on Spotify’s Top 50 chart in the U.S.: Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which garnered a huge audience after going viral last week on YouTube.

Upon listening, the song’s politicized lyrics are likely foundational for its viral success. Unlike most top 50 songs, “Rich Men North of Richmond” speaks with no equivocation to the economic distress many economically marginalized Americans face. Young adults especially are saddled with crippling student debt, hyperinflation that disproportionally impacts lower-income wage earners, and a seemingly impossible housing market where the average home is over $400,000 with climbing interest rates.

The “American dream” of buying a house and supporting a family is increasingly unrealistic for many, and most new homeowners are waiting till age 36 or later to buy. As Anthony says, “Working all day / Overtime hours / For bullsh*t pay / It’s a damn shame.” This sentiment likely resonates with people across the political spectrum. Certainly, the economic stress many Americans face is felt across political party lines.

But in Anthony's view, the culprit of his economic distress appears to be more than “bullsh*t pay”; it’s also politicians and welfare, specifically “obese” people using welfare. We’ll get to the politicians in a moment, but let’s focus on these next few lines regarding welfare and obesity:

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothing to eat

And the obese milking welfare

Well God, if you’re 5 foot 3, and you’re 300 pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

With no ambiguity here, Anthony is critiquing a system and a group of people who have a higher body mass index (BMI) for using welfare because, from Anthony’s perspective, they’re fat and they don’t deserve to use taxpayer dollars to feed themselves; they’ll just buy candy anyway. (I'm writing that irreverently to illustrate the ludicrousness of Anthony’s point.)

It’s important to know that BMI does not accurately describe someone’s health and mathematically fails to correlate with obesity complications (Acharya & Shukla, 2018). Moreover, BMI is normed on White men, which implies that White men are the standard by which everyone else is judged (Strings, 2019). This is one major example of systemic racism and sexism in healthcare, and Black women tend to bear the biggest blow. BMI also does not account for different bone structures or muscle versus bone density. There are many problems with using BMI to measure health, which have been well documented by healthcare experts and statisticians (Kronmal, 1993).

Let’s move on to some of the complications with health outcomes due to our relationship with food. There are a variety of psychosocial and economic reasons that contribute to these concerns. People can develop a poor relationship with food from social stigmatization. Ironically, this song is one of many examples of social stigmatization, but it can also come from parent expectations, media “standards of beauty,” and the dieting industry. A poor relationship with food can also stem from past trauma as a way to cope (Mate, 2010). Finally, eating concerns can also develop from economic hardship and food insecurity, which Anthony’s song is ostensibly trying to describe.

Stress and food insecurity often predict obesity, and there are many reasons for this (Carvajal-Aldaz et al., 2022; Troy et al., 2011). Folks of lower socioeconomic status often do not have the time or access to create and eat balanced meals. Additionally, stress, whether it be economic or social, can launch a whole host of digestive, neurological, and psychological responses that can contribute to weight gain (Troy et al., 2011). Again, all these factors are well documented in healthcare and sociological studies.

What Anthony describes is not a misuse of welfare, then, but it is instead a psychosocial, public health, and economic problem that we are all responsible for fixing. The idea that people are misusing welfare to enable their poor relationship with food lacks critical context, and it further stigmatizes a group of people who have already suffered a great deal of psychological distress inflicted by this same type of social ignorance.

Let's move on to Anthony’s critique of politicians. Historically speaking, politicians do not represent the interest of the people, though they often create the illusion that they do. I argue that all major social change actually comes from the community, not political or corporate power.

Political and historical analysts Noam Chomsky (2002) and Howard Zinn (2015) correctly attribute political change to the social pressure communities put on politicians to enact new policies that hopefully give people more rights and power. Workers organized strikes for fair wages during the Industrial Revolution, White feminists fought for White women’s right to vote (Black women were historically excluded from the feminist movement), Black people violated Jim Crow laws and protested for equal voting rights, gay activists protested for the equality of marriage and HIV/AIDS research, and through all of those social movements, politicians made concessions and changed policy. Organized and distressed communities drive social change—not politicians.

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Political acts of service toward the people’s interests often come as concessions to buy public favor in an upcoming election, and oftentimes if there’s not enough social pressure, these acts are seen as embarrassing or vapid (Zinn, 2015; Chomsky, 2002). For example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a dress that read “Tax the Rich” to the Met Gala. Many analyses highlighted the irony of her message against the backdrop of her tacit support in attending an inarguably elitist celebration of social and economic opulence.

If history has any weight on how political power works in America, Anthony correctly assumes that political power often does not work in the people’s favor. However, history also teaches us that communities, not politicians, have tremendous social power when they sacrifice and rally around a common goal.

These political dynamics are extremely important for the actual conversations about mental health because we know from research that the most significant contributors to psychological distress are not chemical imbalances; they are mostly psychosocial distresses (Hari, 2019). Stated differently, access to medication and even psychotherapy is not going to solve the mental health crisis imposed on us by economic marginalization, family distress, discrimination, lack of social capital and agency, mass incarceration, gun violence, environmental deterioration, and social isolation (Hari, 2016; Mate, 2010).

In conclusion, “Rich Men North of Richmond” gives us sobering and important moments of lament and reflection regarding the collective distress many face amid the stark economic disparities surrounding our sociopolitical landscape. However, in my view, Anthony belly-flops during his take on obesity and welfare—“a damn shame.”