Plenty of folks like Beyonce’s foray into country music, but one of the genre’s young stars was not impressed.
And that is putting it nicely.
In fact, Oliver Anthony in a recent video posted to YouTube, Anthony ripped Beyonce’s offering, calling it “trash.”
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And that was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his take on the industry which he railed against in the 15-minute video.
“When you talk to these management companies and these label-type people about their strategies, they’ll use the word, ‘Create a moment,’” Anthony said. “But they want to have three or four things happen at the same time on social media and different places so that it looks like a moment happened. And then people get inspired by it and almost in a trance by that, and it’s like a phenomenon that they want to know more about.
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“Like we talked about, around the time Richmond came out, it knocked other songs out the way that had millions of dollars in marketing invested,” he said. “We talked about how a lot of the music that goes on the chart, a lot of the companies will buy their own song however many times. They’ll spend a million dollars buying their own song to jump it up the charts where people start to see it. These are all just systems. They are not inherently bad. It’s not like there are a bunch of people sitting around who are evil trying to think about how to trick you into listening to a certain type of song, but it’s just a business model that they’ve followed and adapted to.”
Anthony said that every time he goes to Nashville he realizes “how scary this new era is of people being able to just emerge out of the dark with a phone.”
“When they get you in there, it’s like they definitely try to figure out how to build a character around you that fits what they want and makes you cool and they put you in that category,” he continued. “And the second you step outside of that, you just get so much friction from it.”
He then complained about how industry executives will stall projects that they don’t like.
“It took six or eight months or 10 months of me getting stalled and manipulated and sort of put down and discouraged to say things that I wanted to say to the point that I’m just back to doing my own thing again,” he said. “I guess I don’t need a bunch of nerds and coffee drinking freaks in Nashville to tell me how to live my life. I guess that was my mistake for relying on those people instead of relying on God and on the people I trust.”
Anthony claimed that one person he worked with wanted him to “make some stupid post about Beyonce’s country album, about how it was good, even though it was complete trash.”
“It makes me just want to throw up trying to listen to the beginning of her version of ‘Jolene,’” he continued. “It’s just total cringe. It represents how degenerative our society has become that a Beyonce version of ‘Jolene’ can come out and anybody actually listen to it and think it’s not just complete (expletive) trash. So I was supposed to make a post, basically trying to associate myself with Beyonce, in the hopes of us doing a song together.”…Read more by Brian Linder, blinder1, Brian Linder | blinder@pennlive.com
