“Rich Men North Of Richmond” opens at the top of the Billboard Hot 100

Just a few days after climbing to the top of the charts on Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, and YouTube, Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North Richmond”—the right-leaning anthem against the terrors of taxes, “minors on an island,” and people on welfare—has debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts. That makes Anthony, whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford, the first person ever to have a song open at the top of the Hot 100 with “no prior chart history in any form.”

This comes from Billboard, naturally, which suggests that the song’s success is really part of some huge viral movement, with one of Anthony’s managers saying there “wasn’t some big, massive planning team” trying to get the song to catch on, they just had “a few friends” who helped spread it around. The huge leap from “this is a person nobody has ever heard of” to “he has a song at the top of the Hot 100” is still somewhat hard to swallow, but—just to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and try not to see conspiracies everywhere you look—we do live in a world where it’s difficult to get a large number of people to agree on any one thing, especially if that one thing is music.

It’s not completely unbelievable that a concerted fan campaign, with the help of conservative creeps who love that a song about rich Northerners controlling the world takes some time to fat shame poor people, could legitimately get a song like this to the top of the charts. That being said: It is still weird.

Either way, Anthony is only the sixth artists in the history of the Hot 100 to debut their first solo single at number one, following Zayn, Baauer (we’ll save you the Google: He’s the guy behind “Harlem Shake”), Carrie Underwood, Fantasia, and Clay Aiken. Anthony and Baauer are the only two that seemingly came out of nowhere, but it remains to be seen if “Rich Men North Of Richmond” will have the same kind of… lasting cultural impact as “Harlem Shake.”

In a statement given to Billboard, Anthony said, “the hopelessness and frustration of our times resonate in the response to this song. The song itself is nothing special, but the people who have supported it are incredible and deserve to be heard.” But not, we assume, if those people are poor and overweight.