Music of the Day, 14 March 2025

the rules began to bend

Prompted by whatever mysterious forces resurrect ancient memories, I recalled a brief exchange between a speaker and his audience some 15–20 years ago. He asked us to indicate by a show of hands how much we wanted to earn in our life, and then excoriated everyone who’d raised their hand before he got to “dirty, filthy, stinking rich.”¹

I don’t remember the overall effect of the exercise on the audience,² probably because I was too busy focusing on my own reactions to it and the speaker. My hand had gone up well before his last level … somewhere like “enough to live comfortably and save enough to be able to retire.” I refused to accept his scorn and embrace unbridled avarice as a worthwhile goal.

I grew up poor. For a short period, my then-spouse and I were wealthy; but by then our marriage was largely hollow, and the money somehow made the emptiness worse for me. My kids’ dad and I started out poor, and he worked his way up to a well-paying job while I was the primary caregiver for all his kids, ran the household, and took freelance jobs as I could to cover my own expenses… his wealth³ did not trickle down to us. So I’ve lived all over the income scale except for the uppermost levels, and I wasn’t surprised when I realized that my answer to that speaker hasn’t changed. Money itself isn’t a value to me; it has value in what it enables.

Anyway, after thinking over that for a bit, a song popped into my mind. It’s a story song with a more specific focus than my memory, but it captures my current feelings quite well.

I think “Money Becomes King” started playing on the radio station in my mind because it feels like that’s where much of mainstream American culture⁴ is right now. And I despise it.

I bought Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ 2002 album The Last DJ not long after it came out. It’s only the second studio release of his/theirs I bought, but in its day it got as much play from me as the other (Full Moon Fever) did. His bitterness over the music industry and radio deeply resonated with me; and all the music is solid.

“Money Becomes King” seems to me a sibling of “Into the Great Wide Open,” with the twist of becoming successful and ultimately selling out. Its languid tempo and lush orchestration (by Jon Brion) nicely match Petty’s vocals unwinding Johnny’s sad tale. I’m not sure I’m up for listening to all of The Last DJ today; instead I’ll probably explore the Traveling Wilburys’ music.

1. I’m 95+% certain that’s an accurate quotation, but maybe the adjectives are out of order

2. other than more men than women raised their hands at his final level

3. he did pay for our housing, utilities, and most of the food expenses, but that’s all

4. it’s hard to say, because what’s pushed in the media may not resonate with as many people as desired; and the country is so large that “mainstream” surely varies across it—but all this is too far afield for this essay