Upsetting Day: The Music of John Rich🌭 (Patreon)

As a child of divorce, I spent a great deal of time being driven around in my mother's Dodge Neon, listening to the soulful musical stylings of artists like Amanda Marshall, Jann Arden, and Geri Halliwell. One CD that stood out from the Divorced '90s Woman rotation was Lonestar's Lonely Grill, a relatively inoffensive country pop record filled with crowd-pleasing tracks about subjects like how awesome Saturday is in comparison to the other days of the week. Lonely Grill was the group's breakout success, vastly outselling their previous two albums and crossing over into mainstream radio play.

Did Lonestar just get lucky, or did they deliberately decide to try and write a mainstream record to bust out of the country market? Maybe, and maybe. But this much is historical record: between the release of 1997's Crazy Nights and 1999's certified 3x Platinum Lonely Grill, the band's bassist and sometimes-lead singer departed from the group. That man's name is John Rich.

Seeing his old group hit the big time hurt John Rich. Hurt him bad, like a rattlesnake bite or a lifetime of problem drinking. But he knew that the best revenge is living well, so he teamed up with a fellow named "Big Kenny" to form the duo Big & Rich. That name may not mean anything to you, but you almost certainly know their 2004 single "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)." And I would be remiss here if I did not mention that Big Kenny is a whimsical steampunk giant that is rarely seen without a dramatic hat atop his head.

Big & Rich put out several successful records together, but they haven't released one in almost a decade. This is total speculation, but it's possible that they have found it more difficult to work together as of late due to irreconcilable creative differences. See, Big Kenny's motto is "Love Everybody," which is also the name of a charitable foundation he started. When Big & Rich went on Piers Morgan's show in 2012 to promote their new record "Hillbilly Jedi," Morgan asked Kenny if he was a liberal and his response was to say that, "The sky is our ceiling, the ground is our floor, and the world is our one big happy home, and we oughta just love everybody!" After that, he got up, hugged and kissed Piers, and started singing the ancient songs of the hills and dales.

When Morgan asked if he voted for Obama, Kenny got really serious and said he didn't think it was proper to ask. Rich, meanwhile, straight-up identified himself as a conservative. And I don't think I even need to say this, but the two of them seated next to each other look like a pair of C-list villains who've teamed up to defeat the accursed Bat-menace once and for all. The Mad Hatter and Shame(less).

So, whereas Big Kenny appears to be a transdimensional chaos elf who operates on an orthogonal basis to our human earth politics, John Rich is very much not that. John Rich is, in fact, either an elemental creature of spite and rage or else simply a very cynical, canny showman. Either way, when separated from the moderating influence of Big Kenny, Rich veers hard towards the God and Guns sub-genre.

It wasn't always this way. Rich's earlier work is pretty standard mainstream country fare about America, drinking, trucks, American trucks, drinking, and drunken trucker Americans. But something happened in the late 2000s that pushed him in a darker direction. What could have driven a white male Republican voter into a decades-long blood frenzy in 2008— oh. Right.

His sanity already shattered by the election of Barack Hussein Obama — and he definitely thinks it's important to remember the Hussein part — to the presidency, John Rich's psyche was in no shape to handle the ravages of COVID-19. That said, it may surprise you to hear that in 2020, he penned a pro-quarantine song with his bud Big Kenny called "Stay Home."

But remember — this was early COVID, when even the president was telling people to shelter in place and initiated Operation Warp Speed to develop vaccines. That was before we had scientific evidence that coronavirus only infects liberal bugmen, that it wasn't even that bad anyway, and that people really wanted to go back to the mall and not have to wear surgical masks on planes. As an intelligent man, John Rich's thinking on the subject has followed the science, and he has since taken the video for "Stay Home" offline.

It was around this time that Rich must have realized he was never going to make it in the mainstream. Sure, Big & Rich were successful, but on his own John just didn't have the magic. So he did what any grievance-fuelled well-off middle-aged white man would do: he started making music to own the libs and claiming that his views were being suppressed by the woke country music industry.

In "I'm Offended," Rich takes aim at the fucking dipshits, the absolute beta cucks who still wear masks and drink "sissy" beer. Pathetic. I hope they die. I hope they're killed by a little person who is… too short to enter the bar?

I'm not really sure what we're supposed to take away from that. Let me skip ahead a little to see if things clear up further in.

Ok, well that's Michael Pillow, showing up to deliver a shipment of Christian pillows to a group of women who have gotten into a disagreement. Resolve your differences through a nice wholesome pillowfight, ladies. And hey, if you happen to kiss a little while you're at it, that's fine. Michael Pillow doesn't judge. God told me it doesn't count as sins if you let me watch.

Back to Mr. Beta Male, his fate is not to be canewhipped in the dick or buried under an avalanche of racist pillows. No, he is saved, as so many are, by the love of a huge-racked blonde who offers him a beer from a brewery that bombed so hard in the military town of Norfolk, VA that they went out of business, blamed the "local woke mob," and have begun launching spurious lawsuits against Facebook groups. Behold, the power of a 4.2% ABV lager to rotate your hat 180 degrees!

Careful there, pal! Don't let Mike Lindell see that. He thinks backwards ball caps are a little urban, if you know what I mean.

But "I'm Offended" is small potatoes. It can't hold a candle to John Rich's video for his song "Revelation," which is one of the greatest pieces of art I've ever seen. The song itself is nothing special. It's the Christian country equivalent of making a Starcraft map and naming all the enemy units after the kids who make fun of you at school, then blowing them up with a tactical nuke. It's a deeply pathetic ode to your dad beating up anyone who's ever been mean to you, except your dad is the Abrahamic God. It's the impotent wailing of a man who is 90% hat and 10% cheap bourbon.

Yeah, yeah. God's going to show up and personally kick the asses of everyone you hate. John's not even pretending to hope that the sinners get their act together and find Jesus. Instead, he's cheering on Jesus to find them and wipe them off the face of the earth like a biblical Terminator. I will say, it's smart of John not to ever actually come out and say who the wicked Satan worshippers that he's talking about are, because it lets the listener imagine whatever minority group they most despise being punished by taut, muscular angels. What's a "dark train running," though? John seems to have invented that phrase, which sounds like a genre of really upsetting racially-themed pornography.

The lyrics aren't the point, though. Check this out.

Ok, no, that sucks. That's a regional commercial for a small siding business called "The Singing Sider" who is currently being sued for having sex with his clients' houses. Computer, advance to sequence "church entry jerky spinaround."

Pretty slick, huh? Well, you could be forgiven for closing the video within the first minute, which features nothing but John Rich's weird, stiff body playing guitar like he's worried that too much movement while holding a musical instrument will read as gay. And hey, I don't like to make a habit of mocking people's appearances, but John Rich looks like a dying bully in a '90s children's movie who was granted a wish to become a cowboy. He looks like a man who accidentally dressed himself in hotel drapes and is trying to play it off like it was intentional. He looks like the second runner-up in a Most Racist Facial Hair contest.

But now we're getting to the good shit. Beyond the church, out in the forest, strange things are afoot.

A Doctor Strange portal explodes in the middle of the woods and a Naz'Ghul rides out of it! Holy shit.

He pulls back his hood, revealing the truth — he is a bald man with a circle beard, universally understood to be the most sinister combination of facial and regular hair that a man can have. This guy is absolutely Satan.

Meanwhile, John Rich is wandering around inside the church like Travolta in Pulp Fiction, when he sees something out of the right-hand side windows. Funny that the evil red glow is coming from the left, but it's probably giving him too much credit to believe that it was a deliberate choice.

What happens next is the thing that made me realize I absolutely had to write about this man and his silly little videos. A bolt of lightning strikes the earth and creates an AOE shockwave inflicting 4D6 Holy damage on any lesser demons or radical leftists who happen to be nearby.

And who should emerge from this teleportation field like Mega Man?

No, it can't be. Is that… sexy shirtless Gandalf? Raiden from Mortal Kombat? Old Jesus?

Whoever he is, he's wearing an adorable little hood/cape combo that completely exposes his torso. He's dressed for Seniors Cosplay Night at Chippendale's, not a woodland duel with an over the hill magic shop owner.

The two face off out in front of the old church. This is either about to get violent or sexual. Or both. I've been to Folsom, I've seen what two guys like this can get up to.

Satan sneers at his foe. But behold, Satan, and weep!

Oh shit, it's the Archangel Michael! As foretold in the Book of Revelation, he and Satan will do battle by fire and lightning outside a picturesque country church!

This rocks. This is the best. In an interview about this song, John Rich said, "It ain't like the battle of good and evil in Star Wars," which is maybe the most wrong anyone has ever been about two guys dicking around with magical powers in the woods. Hey, did Michael have tattoos in the Bible, though?

John ends the song by walking out in between these two inhuman combatants and holding up his Bible, singing that all of this was prophesied. It kind of looks like he's refereeing the fight, though. Alright, let's have a good clean apocalyptic battle, no snake transformations or making fun of tribal tattoos.

And, like all good art, "Revelation" leaves us wanting more.

As Michael and Satan make their first moves, we hard cut to a Bible verse that says some stuff about casting down Satan. It doesn't mention any of the stuff in Revelation about the bowls of wrath, sea monsters, dragons, human locusts with lion's teeth that are kind of also scorpions, John eating a little book that an angel gave him, or Jesus being a sheep with seven eyes and seven horns. But hey, they were on a budget.

And you know what? Credit where credit's due, at least this song isn't making John Rich out to be some kind of badass soldier of God who isn't afraid to die in the upcoming holy war against the fell legions of child predators, and who maybe kind of even wishes that someone would just try and kidnap his daughter so that he'd have a Christ-sanctioned excuse to kill, to tear the flesh, to watch as the light goes out of their Satanic eyes and they're dragged down to Hell.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mr. Bob Gray, the brief third member of Big & Rich, fired for suggesting they include a little nuance.

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