Money for Nothing
The voice in this song is not Mark Knopfler’s. He’s just the one writing it down.
He was in an appliance store when he heard it. A delivery man, working, watching a wall of televisions, complaining about the musicians on the screens. The earrings. The makeup. Money for nothing and chicks for free. Knopfler wrote the lines down as the man said them, took them home, and built a song around the man instead of around himself. The narrator of “Money for Nothing” is the guy moving the appliances, and every word of resentment in it is his.
That decision is the whole song. Knopfler doesn’t argue with the delivery man and he doesn’t apologize for him. He lets him talk, and the contradictions stack up on their own. The man wants what the rock stars have. The man is certain they didn’t earn it. Both of those are true at the same time in the same person, which is how it actually works.
That ain’t workin’. That’s the way you do it.
The riff comes in like a machine. That thick, chewed-up guitar tone — Knopfler got it through his fingerpicking and a stack of amps that engineers said wouldn’t work — sounds less like a guitar than something with a motor. Aggressive and exact at once. It’s the sound of the resentment, not a comment on it.
Sting sang the falsetto hook. He was in the studio, the phrase landed over a melody he already had in “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” and it stuck: I want my MTV. MTV put the song on constant rotation. The network that the song is built to mock played it into the ground without flinching, because the network never noticed it was the target.
Eight and a half minutes if you take the long version, and you should. The groove has room in it and the song is better when you let it run. Nothing gets resolved across that length. The delivery man never figures himself out. He just keeps moving the boxes and watching the screen.
What Knopfler did was harder than writing a put-down. He stood next to a man, heard him be small and envious and right and wrong all at once, and refused to look down at him. He set the man’s exact words to a riff and let him be a whole person.
It’s an easy voice to recognize, watching somebody else get lucky.
