Money for nothing

The famous sound of the guitar in this song happened by chance: the sound engineer Neil Dorfsman ( Eng. Neil Dorfsman ) worked on the arrangement of microphones, while Mark played the guitar. At some point, people in the control room asked Neal to stop and listen to what happened. Everyone liked the sound they achieved, and the arrangement turned out to be “so strange that no one would ever have placed microphones like that”. But it was this record that made it onto the Brothers in Arms album. Neil later said that one microphone was then centered and the other on the side 15-20 cm apart. Mark Knopfler tried to get the same sound when recording the parody of this song, which was performed by comedian Weird Al Yankovic ^[3] .

Sting came to Montserrat when a song was being recorded at the AIR Montserrat recording studio, and was invited to record backing vocals. According to Sting, his participation was limited only to the lines of “I Want My MTV”, and he was very surprised when his label began to insist on co-authorship ^[4] .

The narration is carried out on behalf of the loaders of the store, selling video, audio equipment and household appliances, and commenting on what they saw on the TV.

Knopfler wrote the song after a real case when he came to buy a TV. One of the movers saw Dire Straits perform on television and began to grumble why they should carry refrigerators for a small salary, and musicians get “money for nothing and girls for free” on stage for an hour ^[5] . The song is sung on behalf of the hero, who, according to Nofler, is "complete dumbass." In this lengthy “monologue,” the hero comments on the rock extrada, measuring the success of the artist solely in terms of earnings. The vocabulary is consistent with the level of grades. The group then had to listen to a lot of accusations of “sexism, racism and homophobia”. Most of the problems were caused by the word “fagot” ( English faggot ), repeated several times in the second couplet: “Look at this fagot, made up and with earrings .... This fagot has his own plane, this little fagot is a millionaire. ” When playing a song in shops or restaurants in the West, this word is cut out or drowned out. To broadcast on the radio, the second verse has to be cut out completely ^[3] .

The video clip is also notable for the fact that it used computer animation illustrating the words of the song. There is almost no animation as such (the movements of the characters are constrained, and the images themselves are mostly panoramic movements of a virtual camera), but in the 80s it looked spectacular and unusual. The clip itself was awarded the Video Clip of the Year Award at the third MTV Video Music Awards ceremony in 1986. ^[6] .

Initially, Mark Knopfler did not plan to release a video for this song. However, MTV insisted on filming the video, wanting to show it on air. Especially for this, Steve Barron , director of the Rushes animation studio, flew to Budapest to convince Mark to agree to the shooting and to jointly develop the concept of the video clip. The final decision to shoot the video belonged to a Nopfler girl who witnessed a dispute between Steve Barron and Mark Knopfler about MTV's proposal and said that it was a great idea ^[7] .

The clip animation was created on Bosch FGS-4000 by two animators - Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair, who later created Mainframe Entertainment's computer animation studio. It is noteworthy that later in the cartoon ReBoot created by this company, both characters from the video appeared as invited guests in the form of superstars Dire Straits (at the time of their appearance, the famous guitar riff began to sound) in honor of honoring the birthday of one of the heroes (Enzo), however were booed and thrown in garbage.

In the video clip for this song, you can see what is shown on the painted TVs: there you can see the recording of the concert performance “Money for Nothing” by the band Dire Straits itself, and on the line “See the little faggot ...” (Look at this fagot ...) you can see the clip to the song, which is announced as “Baby, Baby” by First Floor, Turn Left album, released by a certain Magyar Records. In fact, this is a clip of the Hungarian pop group Elso Emelet , their name translates just as “Ground Floor”, and Magyar is the name of Hungary itself. The third “clip” in the clip: “Sally” by Ian Pearson Band, Hot Dogs album, record company - Rush Records. Ian Pearson is one of the animators of the clip, and the clip itself is just scenes shot in Budapest . And the name of the record company may be a reference to Rushes Postproduction - the studio where the video for the song “Money for Nothing” was shot ^[3] .

• Brothers in Arms , in which Money for Nothing was the most commercially successful, was the first album in history to sell over 1 million CDs. Philips also sold CD players with the album as a gift ^[3] .
• In January 2011, in response to a complaint from one of the listeners, the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Board forbade Canadian radio stations to play the full version of the song as inappropriate to ethical standards. The complaint came from a person who called himself a representative of the LGBT community, which unites representatives of sexual minorities. Hearing on the radio one of the verses “Money for Nothing”, he found it obscene, because of the use of the word “faggot” in it ^[8] . Not all radio stations followed the prescription, two of them were given as a protest an entire hour of broadcast only for this song ^{[3] [9]} .
• The reference to the words “I want my MTV” is in the splash screen of the 3rd episode of the 9th season of the series “The Simpsons”: Bart Simpson writes the phrase “I no longer want my MTV” on the board .
• The title riff of the song is used as a musical cutscene in the analytical program “Economics on Fingers” ^[10] of the TUT.BY information portal.
• The main riff of the composition was sampled in the song “Talk to her about sex” of the Russian hip-hop group “Bachelor Party” .
• In the cartoon Despicable Me 3 , Grue plays the title riff of the composition on the keyboard , which acts as a weapon.