FEATURE:
Brothers in Arms at Forty
Inside Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing
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ON 17th May…
it will be forty year since Brothers in Arms was released. On 28th June, Money for Nothing came out. A huge single that went to number four in the U.K. and number one in the U.S., I wanted to focus on it ahead of the fortieth anniversary of the album. One that will get a lot of new celebration and praise. I am going to come to a few features about Money for Nothing. One of the divisive things about the song is the lyrics. The homophobic slur that is used in the song might not be coming from songwriter Mark Knopfler. Although he was writing from the point of view of a character, it has not aged well. Not that it was acceptable in 1985, though there was perhaps less stigma and censorship then. Now, it is one of the unfortunate things about Money for Nothing. However, in terms of the song’s impact and importance, that cannot be understated. There are features that discuss the song’s meaning and background. I am going to start with a feature from American Songwriter and a video that both celebrated and attacked MTV:
“The band and its management decided they wanted something bigger. And writing a song that would make for a good MTV video was the best way to do it. Dire Straits weren’t exactly the types that stepped out into the spotlight like that. They didn’t appear on album covers, and their live performances were more about capturing their outstanding roots-rock chemistry and Knopfler’s virtuoso guitar-slinging than raising the Q ratings of the band members.
Luckily, Knopfler stumbled into an appliance store one day, and the song that would do the trick was laid out for him on a platter. He explained it all in an interview with Bill Flanagan, which was included in the book Written in My Soul: Conversations with Rock’s Great Songwriters:
“The lead character in “Money for Nothing” is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television/custom kitchen/refrigerator/microwave appliance store. He’s singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real. It just went better with the song, it was more muscular.”
The Police-Man and the Video
Knopfler took those overheard words and crafted the track, which he then turbocharged with one of the fiercest guitar riffs of the era. Since the song mentioned MTV several times, he decided that a sarcastic refrain of I want my MTV, the network’s catchphrase, would be appropriate. Sting was contracted to deliver the line throughout the song. Because he delivered it with a melody that somewhat resembled The Police hit “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” he was awarded a songwriting credit, even though he had nothing to do with writing any other parts.
To further court MTV, even with a song that was questioning the whole notion of video stars, the band went all-out with a video that featured novel (for its time) computer animation depicting the TV movers from the song, with cutaways to the band in performance. To their credit, MTV got the joke, and helped turn the song into Dire Straits’ first and only No. 1 hit in the US. (Brothers in Arms, the album that contained the song, also topped the charts.)
What Is “Money for Nothing” About?
Some would point out the irony of the title of the song and the fact that Knopfler didn’t have to do a lot of composing (lyrically anyway) to create a smash that helped his and the band’s financial status more than a little. However, discovering those words is one thing. Turning them into coherent, affecting lyrics is another.
The key to the success of the song is the juxtapositions. The narrator/appliance-store worker has to keep interrupting his complaints about the rock stars who play the guitar on the MTV with his own workday drudgery of installing, delivering, and moving TVs and refrigerators. I should have learned to play the guitar, he moans, implying he could have enjoyed a more benign fate.
But Knopfler isn’t afraid to suggest that the store worker is a bit of a lunkhead, with shortsighted beliefs about what goes into the music. Not to mention that he’s somewhat hypocritical: That ain’t working, he whines, all while he’s taking a little break to watch the TVs instead of move them.
Knopfler manages to take the stuffing out of the myth of rock star genius, while also suggesting that maybe it isn’t quite as easy as it looks to the untrained eye. After all, a lot of folks can play the guitar, but few can turn out the pyrotechnics he turns out on “Money for Nothing,” the song where Dire Straits both encapsulated MTV’s golden era and mocked it”.
I will move to a feature from The Guardian. In a very recent chat, we get some fresh insight regarding Money for Nothing and its aftermath. Ahead of the fortieth anniversary of the globe-straddling Brothers in Arms, I have been thinking about a hit that is still played to this day. Even though it needs an obvious radio edit, it has endured forty years. The video is dated and looks rubbish, though the song itself has endured and reaches new generations:
“Mark Knopfler, guitar/vocals/writer
I was in an appliance shop in New York and there was a big bonehead in there delivering gear. All the TVs were tuned to MTV and I overheard this guy sounding off about the rock stars on the screens. He had an audience of one – the junior at the store – and some of his lines were just too good to be true.
Things like: “That little motherfucker’s got his own jet airplane!” And: “He’s banging on the bongos like a chimpanzee!” And: “That ain’t working!” That was just the way he spoke – and in that New York accent too. The bells were going off in my head but I didn’t have a pen with me, so I borrowed one, got a bit of paper and I actually sat down in the window display area of the store and started writing out the lines to Money for Nothing as he said them.
The guitar lick is just a stomp, a two-fingered boogie. It comes from the clawhammer style and it’s got its own rhythm. It was just fun to do. But there were a whole bunch of fortunate incidents that collided with each other to create the song. For instance, I’d seen the Police on the MTV channel saying the phrase: “I want my MTV.” But they also had a song called Don’t Stand So Close to Me, so I put “I want my MTV” to that melody and included it at the start.
While we were recording the Brothers in Arms album at Air Studios on Montserrat, I remember thinking: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could ask Sting to sing that line?” We were on this tiny speck in the middle of the ocean but suddenly someone said: “Sting’s here on holiday! He’s on the beach!” So he came up to the studio and when he walked in, the first thing he said was: “What’s wrong?” I said: “What do you mean?” And he said: “Nobody’s fighting …” [unlike in the Police].
Brothers in Arms was huge. So many people wanted to see the band live. After we played Live Aid at Wembley Stadium, we ran across the car park to Wembley Arena where we were playing that night. In fact, one of the reasons why it felt like I had to scale things back was going into catering and not recognising the crew. That’s when I realised the size of it.
John Illsley, bass
We’d already had four successful albums, so the expectations for Brothers in Arms were pretty high. Thankfully Mark’s writing was sharp as a tack. At that point, we’d convene in a mews house in west London, just with guitars, an acoustic bass and a keyboard, and run through material Mark had been working on.
The Money for Nothing chords and lyrics were already there – and obviously there was Mark’s riff, which was pretty extraordinary. It’s funny: when other guitarists try that riff, they play all the right notes but don’t get the feel. We took our time, and it went from being a Mark Knopfler song to a Dire Straits song. I played the bass in a simple way, happily sitting on the chords, putting down that engine room.
Its title is ironic, because we’d been working solidly for years to get to that point. But everybody viewed us from the outside. Like: “Oh, look at them, that ain’t working, that’s just money for nothing – and they get the chicks thrown in for free.” But it was a bit like Picasso, when he’d do a quick drawing for someone and people would say: “That only took you 10 seconds.” And he’d say: “No, it took me 40 years.”
Brothers in Arms was the first record we’d made with Guy Fletcher, who was a very technical musician. He knew how to work these modern keyboards, while Alan Clark was a wonderful piano player. The two of them created that Money for Nothing intro, and Terry Williams played the most explosive drum solo I’ve ever heard. Then the riff comes in. The guitar tone you hear on the record happened by accident: a microphone got knocked to the floor in front of the speaker and it changed the sound completely”.
I am going to end with an extensive and in-depth analysis of Money for Nothing from Stereogum. Even if the features cover similar ground, it is interesting reading different perspectives and quotes about this giant song. One I remember hearing when I was a child. One of the standout songs of the 1980s, it might have younger listeners wondering what MTV was. Very much of its time in terms of the allure and popularity of that channel, one cannot deny the catchiness of the track and that incredible introduction:
“One day, Knopfler was at a New York appliance store, where a wall of TVs was showing MTV. One of the store’s employees was watching those TVs and talking shit about what he was seeing. As Knopfler saw it, that appliance-store guy had a sort of grudging admiration for the rock stars he saw on that TV. Talking to Rolling Stone after “Money For Nothing” blew up, Knopfler said:
The singer in “Money for Nothing” is a real ignoramus, hard hat mentality — somebody who sees everything in financial terms. I mean, this guy has a grudging respect for rock stars. He sees it in terms of, well, that’s not working, and yet the guy’s rich. That’s a good scam. He isn’t sneering.
When Knopfler heard that guy talking, he grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper and wrote down everything he was hearing, an impulse that Knopfler has credited to his days as a reporter. Knopfler has said that many of the lines on “Money For Nothing” came verbatim from what he heard in that appliance store. The appliance-store guy never got a songwriting credit. If you’re ever talking shit and you see someone taking note of what you’re saying, pay attention. I wonder if that appliance-store worker ever found out how much money his money-for-nothing rant earned for other people.
But here’s the question: Did Mark Knopfler agree with the appliance store guy? Did he sympathize? I’m not sure. Knopfler has said that “Money For Nothing” is satire, that it’s him writing from the point of view of a character and not his own. He’s said that people take the song too literally, that people smart enough to write about the song should understand that he’s clowning the stupidity of the narrator. But Knopfler also hated music videos. You never saw him with an earring or makeup. There’s a real generational divide between Knopfler and most of the musicians who were benefitting from MTV. Maybe Knopfler had a problem with younger artists who, he might’ve thought, didn’t have to work as hard as he had.
There are a lot of divides at work in “Money For Nothing” — between the appliance-store worker and the people on MTV, but also between the appliance-store worker and Knopfler, and between Knopfler and the people on MTV. There are class divides and generational divides. There might be racial divides, too. (Knopfler has never mentioned the race of the guy working in the appliance store.) And then, of course, there’s the divide caused by the use of one particular word — an anti-gay slur that I don’t really feel like typing out here.
I’ve been wrestling with the idea of how to address this side of the song. Even if you’re just singing in character, that word isn’t really the type of thing that a straight white rocker should play around with. This isn’t a case of 1985 being a different time; plenty of people were mad about the “Money For Nothing” lyrics in the moment. Using that particular lyric, in character or not, is a dick move. (A bunch of early-’00s rap hits that I really like also use that slur, and those ones definitely can’t make the argument that the word’s use is satirical, but I guess I’ll wrestle with those ones when this column gets to them.)
I keep talking about the lyrics because they’re so striking — a huge MTV hit comprised of nothing but a guy complaining about MTV hits. But the lyrics aren’t the only thing striking about “Money For Nothing.” Musically, the track is a pretty amazing example of mid-’80s studio-rock excess. The intro — the falsetto “I want my MTV,” the eerie synth pulses, the shattering drum noises, the way the riff enters the song and kicks everything over — is enough to blow your hair back.
That riff rips. Most of the time, Mark Knopfler was more of a tasteful guiter-hero type — a guy who liked doing flowery and lyrical finger-picked solos. But the “Money For Nothing” riff sounds like a dial-tone coming to life and attempting to eat your face. It’s monstrous, and it kicks ass. I love it, and I love the way Knopfler surrounds it with expensive, discordant synth noises. Production-wise, “Money For Nothing” is grimy and futuristic at the same time, like one of the broken-down spaceships from Star Wars.
Knopfler co-produced “Money For Nothing” and the rest of the Brothers In Arms album with Neil Dorfsman, the engineer who he’d worked with on the Local Hero score. At the time, Knopfler was obsessed with ZZ Top, the baby-boomer blues-rockers who’d somehow figured out how to tap right into the MTV zeitgeist. ZZ Top were sillier than Dire Straits, and they had a more indelible image, but they also figured out a way to convey processed grit with their ’80s guitar sound. ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons has said that Knopfler once called him up to ask him how he got that guitar tone. Gibbons didn’t tell Knopfler anything, but Knopfler figured it out anyway. That dog-howling bit late in the track is a total ZZ Top move, too. (ZZ Top’s two highest-charting singles, 1984’s “Legs” and 1985’s “Sleeping Bag,” both peaked at #8. “Legs” is a 8, and “Sleeping Bag” is a 7.)
Dire Straits recorded the Brothers In Arms album on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. While they were recording, Sting was on vacation, windsurfing on the island. He came to the studio and had dinner with Dire Straits, and they played him “Money For Nothing.” Sting loved it, and he jumped into the booth to sing backing vocals. Sting’s a great addition to the track. He sings the high-falsetto “I want my MTV” intro, and his more melodic voice makes a great counterpoint to Knofler’s in-character shit-talk.
Sting recorded his vocal in about an hour, and he ended up getting songwriting credit on the song. When he sang the “I want my MTV” bit, he did it to the tune of the Police’s 1980 single “Don’t Stand So Close To Me.” (“Don’t Stand So Close To Me” peaked at #10. It’s a 6.) Sting later told Dire Straits that he didn’t actually want songwriting credit but that his label insisted on it. You might even say that Sting got his money for nothing. In any case, there was no beef. Sting sang the song with Dire Straits at Live Aid in London. (As a solo artist, Sting will eventually appear in this column.
The people at Warner Bros. thought MTV might be upset about “Money For Nothing,” but MTV loved the song and wanted a video. Knopfler had to be talked into making one. Steve Barron, the early-MTV titan who’d already done the clips for hits like the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” wanted to use new computer-animation toys, and he convinced Knopfler that it could work. A few years ago, Rob Tannenbaum and my former boss Craig Marks wrote an early-MTV oral history book called I Want My MTV — there’s that catchphrase again — and they got Steve Barron talking about the video’s intent:
The song is so damning to MTV in a way. That was an ironic video. The characters we created were made of televisions, and they were slagging off television. Videos were getting a bit boring, and they needed some waking up. And MTV went nuts for it. It was like a big advertisement for them.
In the same book, Adam Ant complains about the “Money For Nothing” video, saying that it changed the MTV landscape. Dire Straits were a visually boring band, but they had the budget for computer animation. If an act had enough money, then, they could get away without putting much work into their performance. They could get over on flash. I don’t know if that’s true or not; visual flash was always important to music videos, regardless of budget. But it’s true that MTV went nuts for “Money For Nothing,” ironic or not. When MTV Europe launched, “Money For Nothing” was the first video it aired. (Adam Ant’s highest-charting US single, 1982’s “Goody Two Shoes,” peaked at #12.)
GRADE: 8/10”.
Because Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms turns forty on 17th May – though some sites say 13th May -, I wanted to return to Money for Nothing (a song I write about a while ago). I cannot forgive or overlook the homophobic lyrics. However, because it is a song that I love and was a huge commercial success, I felt it important to discuss it. If you have never heard the song then listen to it now. From that epic introduction on, you are hooked in. An epic moment in music history that will be played and loved…
DEACDES from now.