Money Money, Cash Cash - songs about currency

So we here in the UK have just had the annual budget and I can't really remember much about it. But I do know quite a lot of songs about money, so here you go.

1) Pink Floyd - "Money"
That most rare of beasts, a 7" single by pink floyd who are the quintessential 'albums' band, doing concept albums like "The Wall", "Animals" and of course "Dark Side Of The moon" where this song ended up on.



2) The Jam - "Pretty Green"
For such an accomplished lyricist as Paul Weller, this is pretty dire. Probably signalled the beginning of the end for The Jam creatively, a band that don't forget, had lots of Number 1 and Top 10 singles.



3) Nas - "Money Over Bullshit"
You might not be surprised to know that any chart with a money theme will be overwhelmed by Rap and Hip-Hop song titles. This is one of the better ones, from what I take to be Nas' best album "Hip Hop is Dead" though most will tell you it was his debut "Ilmatic"



4) Mickey Dread - "Money Dread"
From the brilliant album "World War 3", Mickey Dread collaborated a lot with The Clash, but his own work is cruelly overlooked.



5) Swans - "Time Is Money (Bastard)"
Well they released an album called "Greed/Holy Money" where the songs explore the naked power relations of work/bosses, money, power, exploitation and religion. This one is about how the human body can be purchased.



6) The O'Jays - "For The Love Of Money"
Funky!



7) Hope Of The States - "Black Dollar Bills"
Had high hopes of this band to do what Radiohead did and do it way better, but a band member's suicide put the kybosh on that hope.



8) The Skids - "Working For The Yankee Dollar"
I liked the Skids, or at least I thought I did. But their stuff hasn't aged well and is pretty unlistenable now. Lead singer Richard Jobson left to become a male model, says it all really.



9) World Domination Enterprises - "Blue Money"
Drugs, dub heavy bass and an unholy mess of a band, but boy were they loud!



11) Flying Lizards - "Money (That's What I Want)"
Better than the Beatles' original. No more needs to be said. Other than they used to employ all sorts of found objects for their music.



12) Mos Def - " Sex, Love & Money"
Did you know Mos Def had a cameo in "Talladega Nights"?



13) Cop Shoot Cop - "10 Dollar Bill"
One of the more disturbing videos and a riff ripped off from The Stranglers but what's not to like huh?



14) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Easy Money"
As Nick says/ I agree with Nick... remember how that dominated the televised political leaders debates last time round? Wonder how that will go for Nick Clegg this time?

Political Songs - A Chart

With a General Election coming up in Britain in May, thought I'd unearth some political-related songs. I've already done an earlier chart on the related theme of Revolution - "A Little Light Molotov Cocktail Music" 


1) Heaven 17 - "We Don't Need This Fascist Groove Thang"
Never liked all that New Romantic floppy quiff and high mounted bass thing, but this song popped out completely unexpectedly from the genre. Respect!



2) Crucifucks - "Democracy Spawns Bad Taste"
American hardcore punks, all throbbing bass and rumbling drums, somewhat undermined by the squeaky vocal.



3) Circle Jerks - "Coup D'Etat"
More US hardcore punk. I've ben going through university courses with my son who wants to do American studies, two of the courses offer a module on American punk, one on hip-hop. *Sigh*



4) Killing Joke - "Democracy"
Almost has the feel of one of those songs politicians commission for a campaign to get more young people to vote. Killing Joke had definitely lost it by this time. However, couple of years ago they released a dub remix of their songs, knockout it was, one my best albums of that year.



5) Muse - Exo-Politics
It's Muse, so it's about space politics right?



6) Nas - "Black Republican"
Bit of a specious one this, as it's really about ghetto hip-hop politics and very little to do with Congressional representatives.



7) The Sex Pistols - "Anarchy in The UK"
The grand-daddy of them all, although their concept of anarchy is a bit underdeveloped! Still a great song even after all these years.



8) Radiohead - "Electioneering"
I assert my democratic right to state that I have never liked Radiohead. This is just bad early genesis to me.



9) Dead Kennedys - "We Got A Bigger Problem Now"
Ronald Reagan provided a whole music sub-genre of American hardcore devoted to ragging on him. This song is one of the best, but was itself an updating of their earlier song "California Uber Alles" when Reagan was Californian Governor.



10) Dillinger - "Natty Socialist"
Jamaica, the land of heavy political violence.

Dreams - a Music chart

Well if it's good enough for Shakey (William, not Stevens) then it must be a subject rich for the arts. here's a music chart of Dream themed songs (but not David Essex's "Silver Dream Racer")


1) Sonic Youth - "I Dreamed I Dream"

An early SY song this, before their layered sound had really started to cohere. But it's still brooding with menace and the husband and wife swapped vocals is really effective. Kim Gordon's book "Girl in A Band" has just come out. She was anything but that in Sonic Youth.



2) London Underground - "Dreams Are Better"

Spacy, dubby soundscape does conjure up a dreamy sensibility.



3) Mamas And Papas - "California Dreaming"

Infinitely prefer this version than the Beach Boys, even prepared to overlook the fashion faux pas.



4) The Fall - "Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul"

If you're going to include a Fall song in any music themed chart, chances are Mark E Smith's sensibilities are going to cut against the grain of the theme and sure enough, here the Hip Priest warbles his disapproval of the Wigan Casino's soul capital reputation.



5) Gang of Four - "We Live As We Dream Alone"

A quote from Joseph Conrad and I always want to put a comma after the 'Dream' and before the 'Alone'. Talking of fashion faux pas... Still one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands.



6) Fire Engines - "Big Gold Dream"

Here's a band that somehow haven't featured in a chart of mine before even though I really like them. The perspective is very odd here, the band look like tall thin giants compared to the dancers in the front.



7) Magik Markers - "Bad Dream"

I only discovered this band relatively recently and their album "Boss" has gone into my all-time top 20. Usually wig-out noise merchants, this shows an alarming degree of disturbia through a much lighter touch. Fabulous.



8) Pauline Murray & the Invisible Girls - "Dream Sequence 1"

Pauline Murray sounding just like she did when fronting punk band Penetration, though with more poppy backing than the thrash 3 chords of punk.



9) New Order - "Dreams Never End'

Fascinating track that shows the partial emergence of the New Order sound from that of Joy Division, but still with its roots very much traceable. They all look so tentative here.



10) Suicide - "Dream Baby Dream"

If there was ever a soundtrack of nightmares, Alan Vega provided it.



11) Eurythmics - "Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This"

I wasn't really a fan of the 80s, most of my favourite bands expired in the early 80s. I always associate this song with the grim politics of the era. A kind of corporate sponsored vision of nightmarishness.



12) Supertramp - "Dreamer"

Before punk came along, I used to listen to stuff like this. Thank god for punk I say. These days this sounds like Leo Sayer  to me. Crime of the century? That this type of music held sway for so long.



13) Television - The Dream's Dream"

This was probably around a similar time to the Supertramp and represented a precursor of punk and new wave that swept away the old rock dinosaurs. But these guys could still play their instruments, apart from Richard Hell obviously!



14) Nas - "Sweet Dreams"

I like Nas, but he really needs to get himself a decent artistic director to make his videos. they're all the same and universally awful.



15) Chemical Brothers - "Dream On"

They're called the Chemical Brothers for a reason. Spacemen 3 would have killed for this song.



16) Electric Prunes - "I had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)"

Dressed like choirboys yet their sound was a distortion, fuzzed up glorious romp.



17) Tricky - "Bad Dreams"

And we're back with the paranoia latent in dreams. or not so latent in this case. Tricky regarded all life as a bad dream.




18) Lil Kim - "Dreams"

Oh do get on with it! Once she's 43 seconds in it really locks in to a remorselessly mean vibe.



19) The Bug - "Thief Of Dreams"

Dubstep is supposedly an edgy dreamy urban soundscape and The Bug is all that and more. But the vocalist in this spins a terrifying narrative that is anything but dream like.



20) Minutemen - 'Dream Told By Moto"

Or the 4 minute warning till the bomb drops... no dream this for us in the 80s, we really had these thoughts and anxieties.

My Top 25 Albums Part 2

So part 2 of my top albums chart, counting down from 12 to number 1. You can read part 1 here.

12) Public Image Limited - "Metal Box" - 1979
When Johnny Rotten left the Sex Pistols, he joined up with musical virtuoso Jah Wobble and multi-instrumentalist Keith Levene who was a post-punk experimentalist before anyone else even knew what that meant. After a first commercial album, they produced this glorious dubby-punky album which ideally suited Rotten (now John Lydon's) snarling delivery. The original release came in a silver movie-reel canister, but the packaging warped the vinyl inside and made it unplayable. The album was re-released in a normal sleeve and called "Second Edition", either way it was a record they never bettered as their sound became more commercial and Levene left in protest.

11) The Birthday Party - "Junkyard" 1982
A thunderous rhythm section with two drummers, Roland S Howard's guitar noodlings suddenly lurching into squalling feedback and Nick Cave's literary pretensions and on-stage showmanship meant that The Birthday Party were the kings of alternative once the post-punk movement had largely fizzled out by 1980. One of the drummers left shortly after this album and the band were never quite the same again.

10) Minutemen - "Double Nickels On The Dime" 1984

A double album of 45 songs, virtually all at under 2 minutes duration, as this tight three-piece knitted together punk, jazz and West Coast Head music into a wonderful mosaic of an album. I don't really like the word "vibe", but it absolutely fits this album, as their sound manages to feel both sparse and lush at the same time. 

9) Butthole Surfers - "Rembrandt Pussyhorse" 1986

Acid punkers with a serious Black Sabbath addiction, this album is just crazy wonderful. There's not much more to say about it, other than they were wonderful live.


8) 23 Skidoo - "Seven Songs" 1982

Industrial funk, now there's a music style to grapple with. This is one of those albums that has two stand-out tracks which soar above the rest, although the track that samples Oswald Moseley's widow is quite disturbing. The album actually has 8 songs in that post-modern ironic way.




7) Nas - "Hip Hop Is Dead" 2006
I tend to like my hip-hop intelligent, if not necessarily political, but this album was inflammatory with its call to arms to save the genre from just being commercial product. The title track is so strong, but I also love the track below, part encomium for the history of hip hop, part excoriation for what it's become, a tension that runs throughout the album.

6) The Cure - "Three Imaginary Boys" - 1979

This album was lo-fi indie rock before anyone invented the term and before The Cure went all bloated Stadium Goth. Robert Smith's voice has a plaint in it throughout which lends itself perfectly to pop songs, while the raw production of the instruments admirably cuts across the winsome vocals. Plus the album cover is my favourite of all time. 

5) Beastie Boys - "Check Your Head" 1992
The Beastie Boys had changed their image and reputation as dumb party animal rappers with the release of "Paul's Boutique" three years earlier, but this was the album that set the tone and format of their career, of playing live instruments and its glorious melange of thrash punk, reggae, old school hip hop, and jazz.

4) Liars - "Drums Not Dead" 2006
The 1990s was a bleak time musically for me. Many of the bands in this chart had split up, or had members die and I'd pretty much stopped buying music and given up going to gigs. But this band more than ever reignited my passion for music in the Noughties with their art-noise albums, where they less construct songs and more compose sound scapes, with voice as just another instrument. Any of their albums could have made it into this chart, but I'm limiting myself to one per band and this just scraped in ahead of the others, ostensibly because of its coherent concept in sound throughout, though don't ask me what the concept of this album actually is!


3) Einsturzende Neubauten - "Halber Mensch" 1985
And talking of art noise, there's no one who quite sound like Neubauten. Industrial, but without the rhythmic discipline of some notional dignity of labour straitjacketing them. German, or more precisely Berliners, when that city was divided against itself, and yet they weren't averse to digging back into their own country's folklore and even somehow defined a German 'Blues'. Bargeld's lyrics bounced from the cosmological scale to the microscopic viral one, positioning mankind very firmly in its insignificant place. This album is the sumptuous sound of decay and decline.

2) Misty In Roots - "Live At The Counter Eurovision" 1979
Quite simply the best reggae album ever made. And despite being live, the sound quality is fantastic.
My only chagrin is that the CD is hard to come by at a reasonable price and someone nicked my original vinyl.

1) Joy Division - "Closer" - 1980
Just the perfect- if depressing- album without a single duff track on it (which is why I chose it over their "Unknown Pleasures" album which is more insistent musically, but has one weak track on it). There's not much more to say about this album that I haven't said on other posts and scores of devotees have also committed to words. Like I say, a perfect 10 and that second side of the album just sends shivers down my spine even after 32 years of listening to it.