Welcome to Polls Apart, the Clash barometer of the best and worst facets in music. At ten, the antithesis of cool – the worst perpetrators of musical crimes. At one, the most influential and heroic saviours. Let count down commence!
This month: MONEY
10. Simply Red ‘Money’s Too Tight To Mention’
Not to belittle some fine records, but often the best of soul and hip-hop can fall politically short of the mark. ‘What’s Goin’ On’ is only a question, not an answer. ‘The Message’ was just a list of problems that the council needed to sort out. But of course no one cares when the music’s great and the song comes from the heart. People start to take issue only when pasty, redheaded Mancunian soul-pop crossover artists start plundering the back catalogue of American soul standards. “Money’s too tight to mention / I can’t even qualify for my pension… Cut back!” howls Hucknall on this travesty, like an orangutan masturbating his furry ginger cock with the hole in a Stax 7”. “Talking about Reaganomics…” Why? Why are you talking about “Reaganomics”? What the fuck is it Mick? Look around Greater Manchester why don’t you instead and draw some inspiration from real poverty in our times rather than hypocritically grabbing other people’s music for your platinum-selling album.
9. Hard Fi ‘Cash Machine’
Sometimes when you watch The X Factor there’s a contestant who’s above average at singing but hasn’t got a good sob story (not fat, not gay, Nan’s not dead etc.). So they go to the branch of Topshop where they work and get them to look longingly out of the automatic doors and say, “It can be really hard sometimes knowing this is not where I’m meant to be in life”, like somehow God has dealt them a shit hand and they’ve ended up, horrifyingly, doing the same sort of thing as everyone else. It’s the same pathetic, whinging attitude that’s stamped all over this song. “Go to a cash machine / To get a ticket home / A message on the screen / Says don’t make plans, you’re broke.” Oh, I’ve got no money, my job’s shit, I have to plan my finances in advance and cough up for a working public transportation system. Grow up, you twats. It’s called society. And when you’re a lazy, ignorant indie band, who gets lucky with a couple of singles, you should definitely keep your mouth shut about social injustice until you actually know something about it.
8. Destiny’s Child ‘Bills, Bills, Bills’
It seems there’s a serious issue at stake affecting the future of the urban population. The ratio of decent men to scrubs (indecent men) is weighted on the scrub side. Where is the next generation of father figures going to come from? Little boys will have no training in basic decorum. They won’t know that it’s unreasonable to max out their girlfriends’ credit cards, or use their girlfriends’ cellies to call Momma, or borrow their girlfriends’ cars to go ghost riding the whip all day without filling up the tank afterwards. Typical. The questions, understandably, have to be asked. “Can you pay my bills? / Can you pay my telephone bills? / Can you pay my automo’bills?” Despite the bizarre double-speak elision of “automo’bills”, it’s a fair point. Kick the brother out on his bottom, we shout in united chorus. He ain’t no good for you, etc.
7. ABBA ‘Money, Money, Money’
Women, it seems, are the financial axel around which the money markets of the world revolve. Everywhere you look men are exploiting women to make a quick buck. Realising this, the second wave of feminism in the 1970s sought to give women back their dues by playing the system. “The glass ceiling can shatter itself”, they thought, “let’s just marry some rich men instead”. ABBA led the revolution. “In my dreams I have a plan / If I got me a wealthy man / I wouldn’t have to work at all / I’d fool around and have a ball.” Lofty ideals indeed. One problem though… “And if he happens to be free / I bet he wouldn’t fancy me.” Yep, it don’t work if you’re fugly, I’m afraid. If you want to be part of this nice little scheme then you’ve got to get down the gym or go under the knife. Always remember, women; your body is your most valuable commodity. Now go, cover yourselves in slap and throw yourselves at the nearest banker.
6. Ol’ Dirty Bastard ft. Kelis ‘Got Your Money’
It’s four minutes of perverse, misogynistic drivel with ODB assuming the role of a pimp to deliver killer couplets like, “I don’t have no problem with you fucking me / But I have a little problem with you not fucking me”, yet this is an insanely catchy song; pretty much the ultimate guilty pleasure (apart, perhaps, from Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Lemon Incest’; a song about incest between a father and daughter that he sang with his fourteen-year-old daughter Charlotte. Look it up, it exists.) The gist is that some bitch has got ODB’s money and bitch better give him his money, pronto. It makes you wonder why we tolerate this as pop music, but then the bass drops in and you just can’t help but strut like a total fanny, pretending that you’re Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear in the Starsky & Hutch remake.
5. Pink Floyd – ‘Money’
The inevitable moment has come when we have to mention the credit crunch. Global economic meltdown / hard times ahead / Marks & Spencer’s meal deal now only £2… covered. Yes, times are hard for us normal people forced to do without all the unnecessary consumer crap that kept the economy buoyant for so long. And in this woeful situation we look up from our £2 meal deals with bitter tears in our eyes to point the collective finger at the bankers. They hide in penthouses across the city, not giving two shits, doing coke off each other’s faces and laughing hysterically as ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ plays in the background. “Money, it’s a hit / Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit / I’m in the high-fidelity first class travelling set / And I think I need a Lear jet.” Pink Floyd’s condemnation of a money-driven society is pretty basic satire, but its jerky 7/8 time signature and materialistic lyrics capture the flow of city life very accurately. It is still the closest musical approximation ever put to tape of the whirring cogs of business, oiled with smugness, fuelled by the burning souls of thousands of crushed human beings.
4. The Beatles – ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’
The irony of most hit songs about money is that they’re made by people who have fucking loads of it; people who would wipe their arses with bank notes if they offered better purchase than toilet tissue. Hence it almost always sounds insincere when they say that money doesn’t matter. The Beatles got close to a kind of innocent believability on ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ though if they really didn’t care, it was only because they were at the height of Beatlemania and the dream was going to last forever. The Fab Four were each just looking for someone who felt the same relaxed way about life. “Tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can’t buy”, they requested of potential mates. Years later Paul McCartney would find that exact person, a one-legged philanthropist by the name of Heather Mills whose concern for money was virtually non-existent and who brought great happiness and comfort into his world.
3. M.I.A. – ‘Paper Planes’
M.I.A. is of Sri Lankan origin, the daughter of a notorious political activist in her home country who supports and trains separatist Tamil militants. When the danger from civil war in Sri Lanka became too great, she and her family moved to India and then to London. She now chooses to live in one of the most dangerous areas of New York – Bedford Stuyvesant, where Jay-Z grew up and the Spike Lee movie ‘Do The Right Thing’ is set. Like some kind of gangster tourist, she’s picked up a little bit of hustle from every place she’s been to in her life: swagger from Sri Lanka, India, London and Baltimore where some of the album, ‘Kala’, was recorded. On ‘Paper Planes’ M.I.A. covers drug running, passport forgery, murder and basic street corner drug dealing, all in her too-cool-to-care rapping drawl, like a nonchalant career criminal turning up, sleepy, to start the working day. Witness indie kids in clubs firing fake bullets into the air at the chorus and despair.
2. Barrett Strong ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’
‘Money’ is one of the most popular and enduring hits ever released by Tamla Motown. Appropriately, it’s also been one of music’s milkiest cash cows for some time, having been covered by everyone from The Beatles to Scissor Sisters. Even more appropriately, the lyrics are alleged to have been half-inched from a John Lee Hooker song. The opening lines “The best things in life are free / But you can give them to the birds and bees / I need money… ” are virtually identical to those of Hooker’s track, ‘I Need Some Money’. Nice one Barrett, you’ve got to make a living somehow, haven’t you mate.
1. Wu Tang Clan – ‘C.R.E.A.M.’
“Cash rules everything around me / Cream get the money. Dollar, dollar bill y’all.” This Method Man lyric – one of the best vocal hooks in rap history – kicks off hip-hop’s crowning statement on ghetto life. Raekwon The Chef and Inspector Deck both spit verses about their lives so far, chronicling the archetypal rags to (illicit) riches rap story, going from the New York slums, to robbing white boys on the basketball courts, to making forty Gs a week, to prison. This isn’t the hole-in-my-pocket, whimpering bullshit of starving indie boys, or the hypocritical money-doesn’t-matter philosophy of megastars, this is hardcore people who you’d never want to meet in the wrong context, rapping about the awful stuff they’ve done, firstly out of poverty but later out of greed. The philosophy of the street is barely a philosophy at all; it’s a desperate desire for cash that drives people to the edge – something that this track captures entirely.
Words by Jonny Ensall
