It's Mark Knopfler's birthday. He's a pretty cool guy. You probably know him as the lead guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter for Dire Straits. He also produced an album for Weird Al. Funky stuff. He wrote the score for one of my favorite movies, too— The Princess Bride.
But there's something special about “Money for Nothing.” That's been my “song” since I was a fetus.
Seriously.
It was really big when my mom was pregnant with me. She said it was on all the time. So you know how sometimes people will put headphones up to their stomachs and play Mozart or something for the unborn kid? Well, I got Dire Straits.
As I was born smack in the middle of the 1980s, I'm sort of proud to have this song be one of my little anthems. The song is in first person, but it's not Mark Knopfler singing the song. It's a character. And it's a pretty cool character.
Here's what Knopfler had to say about it:
“The lead character in 'Money for Nothing' is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television/custom kitchen/refrigerator/microwave appliance store. He's singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real...”
Yeah, Knopfler actually wrote the song in the hardware store. He took notes based on what the guy working there was saying. I guess MTV was on in the store, and the guy didn't get it. He said stuff like, “What are those? Hawaiian noises? That ain't workin'.”
That's how you write. You take what's going on around you, and you mash it up and make it something else. We're at the point, I think, where you really can't say anything new. But you can still say it the way you want to say it.
There will probably be more later on songs that define me as a person.
One notable one would have to be ZZTop's “Tush.”
That won't get its own blog post, though. Because it's easy enough to figure out.
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