Barbie, Oliver Anthony, Sovereignty, & the Popular Arts II
Warner Brother’s Barbie and country singer Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” share a number of qualities, principally success and speed, for all their differences in audience, production elements, values, and content.
By the week of August 13th, Barbie grossed nearly $1.2B since its Friday, July 21st movie theater release, Box Office Mojo reports.
Following Monday, August 7th radiowv YouTube sharing of “Rich Men North of Richmond,” Oliver Anthony (whose birth name is Christopher Lunsford according to a report) found that the song achieved Number 1 iTunes downloads with 12M views and that five of his performances commanded iTunes Top ten in less than a week. The song enjoyed such popularity that many in the audience had memorized the lyrics and sang along with him with 2020’s authenticity analogous to the very different excitement Elvis Presley loosed in his 1954 Louisiana Hayride performance at the Morris Farm Market on the Outer Banks, North Carolina that weekend. And, all of this in the absence of Hollywood movie stars and publicity.
Barbie Director Greta Gerwig’s and Oliver Anthony’s creative achievements demonstrate the importance of global markets in terms of velocity and ubiquity. While YouTube downloads and shares may be the poor man’s box office, they nonetheless established Anthony as a creative artist worthy of consideration as an investment vehicle. A singer no one on Madison Avenue would devote any real time to on the 4th of July or Juneteenth was all of a sudden a top, global attraction, -- perhaps a new Hank Williams, or Bob Dylan, or articulate, hillbilly Bruce Springsteen -- in mid-August when everyone wanted to take a breather in the Hamptons or on the Vineyard.
As to form, Gerwig’s and Anthony’s distinct successes vindicate contemporaneous investment. No sooner had Chat GPT Sam Altman demonstrated that he could engineer generative pre-trained transformers to milk, cull, fine tune, and digest large language models to spit out content close enough to coherent conversation in late 2022 and early 2023 than network operator, social media and Internet search oligopolists either invested in the technology and drove up its asset value or launched their own initiatives to forestall competitors lest innovators obsolesce their relevance business models. Something similar had transpired with Facebook when Microsoft had plopped down $240M to drive up its price and lockdown its operating system market in October, 2007. While no competitors seem quite as sanguine for Barbie, which is entangled in multiple production and licensing matters to sort through before Barbie 2 can appear, nor for rustic singer, the salient similarities are that Barbie and “Rich Men North of Richmond” demonstrate business models where one can get in, get out, make big money with relatively low production costs ($1450M for $1.2B gross for Barbie) or achieve phenomenal recognition quickly with a radiowv’s video upload of a competently produced, creative work. It’s all a commercial environment, or media ecosystem, or global market, whatever term of art one embraces, suffusing everything from mass market repetition to Piedmont and Appalachian originality.
Anthony hints at this when he comments that ‘things are too fast.’ While the beneficiary of that velocity for “Rich Men North of Richmond,” his old soul cherishes conversation with neighbors and a human, sociable pace of life.
But, the fact of the matter is that investors want to get in, double, triple, quintuple, or more their investment, and shed risk lest a new entrant introduce something better and disrupt markets.
As for content, Barbie director Greta Gerwig and Virginia bard Oliver Anthony address a common sense of too little return for too much exertion. Barbie feels she’s earned all she’s got. For all the differences in fantasy, notably Barbie’s persona as a toy, the film’s theme that women merit greater and more consideration scores global appeal.
Anthony articulates the thinking and feelings of many that they suffer too little income despite too much work due to captured public officials working more for global elites than American citizens. “[L]ivin in a new world” is principally extractive for those with an “old soul” forced to cope with “rich men north of Richmond/…[who] just wanna have total control/Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do/And they don't think you know, but I know that you do/ 'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end.”
It is in these regards that sovereignty emerges as a unifying complement.
Its nominal definition from John Stuart Mill as “that [form of government] in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the community” is not yet broad enough for Barbie to overcome historic grievances and is so woefully compromised by elite capture to provoke rage for Anthony.
Sovereignty is the invisible hand animating and undergirding Barbie and “Rich Men North of Richmond” velocity and ubiquity, because it is no longer what it used to be, and people want to make sense of what’s going on. Several instances so attest.
Constitutional imbalances disorient. “We need a Congress that writes laws and then stands before the people and suffers the consequences…. We need an executive branch that has a humble view of its job as enforcing the law, not trying to write laws in the Congress’ absence. And, we need a judiciary that tries to apply written laws to facts in cases that are actually before it,” former Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) pointed out in Senate Judiciary Committee comments during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing in 2018.
Instead, congressional show trials, executive decrees, and judges refereeing regulatory reach constitute government.
Uncertainty is constant amid diminishing purchasing power. Fiscal and monetary policies work at cross purposes. While the executive and legislative branches stoke public investment, so doing and impels the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to dampen inflation lowering the real wealth of the intended beneficiaries.
Experts are partial. As COVID public policy demonstrated, expert guidance dismissed countervailing science and mandated draconian, behavioral restrictions benefitting favored industries and enterprises invariably to the disadvantage of local and regional businesses while generating massive profits for remote oligopolies.
Public safety falters and fails. No fire alarms and inadequate water pressure at hydrants led to Maui burning as real-time backdrop in early August. Six months earlier, regulatory safeguards went to the wind poisoning East Palestine, Ohio six months earlier in February, 2023.
Even something as routine as reliable electric power is now dicey due to unbalanced decommissioning and retirement of dispatchable coal, natural gas, and nuclear power for inadequate, intermittent, renewable power.
Partisan journalism provokes doubt while daily reporting of shootings day after day reduce citizens to smh, shaking my head.
Many, many people work longer hours for less real wealth.
All of these examples symptomize sovereignty’s erosion and diminishment. As if to underscore poet Anthony’s prescience that “your dollar ain’t shit,” India purchased 100M barrels of oil from the UAE in rupees, not dollars, MoneyWise reported, on August 15th.
Amid these troubling symptoms and grave challenges, Gerwig and Anthony in her and his own way cultivate the popular arts to address consciousness. “The danger ‘in Europe’ is of having too many things to say, and too many others to distinguish them from; the danger in the States is of their not having things enough—with enough tone and resonance to give them,” Henry James memorably observed in The American Scene (1907). Filmmaker and singer say plenty with distinct tone and exact resonance to appreciative audiences in summer, 2023.
Anthony is intent taking on responsibilities as a fresh Mark Twain responding to Henry James’s concerns. Country Chord reported that “he put together a last minute show in North Carolina at the Morris Farm Market…. And if you take the time to drive out to hear him live, he promised to stay late to meet every fan in return. ‘I will stay until 2:30 a.m. if I have to…I promise if you show up, if you are willing to come and listen to me, I am willing to stay and listen to you. I’m gonna shake your hand. I wanna hear what you have to say, I wanna hear your story. This is not about me; this is about you.’ ”
Anthony’s also humble. “This song… is not like some masterpiece I’ve created,” he remarked in a YouTube share returning from the Outer Banks show. “….hey look, I appreciate all the compliments but… I hardly know my way around the guitar, my singin’s ok, that’s not what made this… … The masterpiece and energies of the song already exist within you,” he continued. “When Oliver Anthony’s long gone and forgotten about, what can you do to maintain this energy, this positivity, this unity I see among people like I’ve never seen before. ?... At this moment in time when so many people are feeling the same frustrations, it would be wonderful to use that positive energy to help other people in your life,…from this anomaly of a song…, find a way to start having good conversations with people around you… everyone has a really interesting story if you just give them the time to talk…, that’s all I want out of this.”
hcd@coolbook.me
Hugh Carter Donahue, Ph.D., is a scholar and consultant. www.coolbook.me publishes and Amazon Kindle distributes his books.
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