6 - ‘We're Only in It for the Money’: the rock business

Summary

‘We're Only in It for the Money’, a record released in 1968 by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, was intended as a biting satire of the Beatles' ambitious concept album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In a malicious and provocative manner this record contrasted the ambitious artistic claims of the Beatles' production with the pure commercial reality of rock. Even if it is not quite fair to describe the aesthetic and political intentions of ‘progressive’ rock music as merely a particularly clever veiling of real commercial motives, it cannot be denied that in the end, even for the Beatles, money was a prime concern. Within the overall relations of capitalism and under the conditions of an industry structured along monopolistic lines the relationship between goods and money is the foundation which makes the production and distribution of rock music possible, whether musicians admit this or not. In fact it is really ironic that the ideology of rock should amount to anti-capitalism, even though this is only illusory, since more than any other this music is inextricably linked to the basic mechanisms of capitalism and itself became an industry organised along capitalist lines. Every successful rock band already represents a capitalist enterprise of often considerable size with its own commercial activities in the music industry. Just recall, for instance, the Beatles' Apple organisation. Yet the whole thing was underpinned by a structure controlled by just a few multinational media companies and monopolistic to a degree rarely found in any other field of business.