When things get tough … the tough come out ahead, Billy Ocean sang back in 1985. But we’re not going to do that, although our time travel is going to end up taking us precisely to that year. We said that, when things get tough, sometimes even commercial pop is tinged with the spirit of the times and sneaks some songs of vindictive tints into its offer aimed at evasion. This phenomenon occurred with particular intensity in the early 1980s, during the recession that followed the 1979 energy crisis. Our ‘economic music’ today also has the particularity of having been successful in two different versions, which we could call the American and the British, as a reflection of the global condition of that decline.
The original was signed by The Valentine Brothers, a duo made up of two brothers from Ohio that included it on their second album, 1982. With a style halfway between funk, soul and disco music, the song It updated an approach that had already become popular half a century earlier, during the Great Depression: it gave a voice to an impoverished citizen who found himself in a situation of need and saw the successive doors to which he called for help were closing. . In the first stanza of ‘Money’s Too Tight (To Mention)’ (a title that could be translated as ‘We are so badly off money that we better not talk about it’), the narrator exposes his worrying situation like this: “I have been fired from my job, I owe the rent, / all my children need new shoes, / so I went to the bank to see what they could do. / They told me: ‘Son, it seems that bad luck has caught you’ ». The man, who no longer has the possibility of obtaining an “extension of unemployment”, then goes to his brother, but he too is in a difficult situation. He then turns to his father, to whom three-quarters of the same thing happens with his pension. And, of course, the politicians do not give him any help either: “We are talking about Reaganomics there in Congress,” sums up a line, referring to the neoliberal policies promoted by President Ronald Reagan. The song makes it clear that it was not only the unemployed who suffered from the hardships typical of that period: «I am working from nine to five, five days a week, / I am on my feet for up to forty hours and I don’t earn enough to survive (…) . / They say we are in recession / when they know that the world is depressed », sing the brothers, who even drop a ‘money’ in Spanish.
The Valentine Brothers didn’t do badly at all with their ‘Money’s Too Tight (To Mention)’, but The song would multiply its fame three years later, in 1985, when it was covered by the British soul-pop group Simply Red and released as their first single. The band’s redheaded lead singer, Mick Hucknall, was well aware of the subject of DJing in his DJ days. His is a less generous interpretation in funk but lyrically faithful, whose most striking contribution is a direct interpellation to Nancy Reagan at the end of the song: “Did the earth move for you, Nancy?”, They ask her, using a linked formula usually sex (roughly equivalent to “Have you enjoyed yourself, Nancy?”).
Both the United States and the United Kingdom were hit hard by the crisis of the 1980s. On that side of the Atlantic, The Valentine Brothers song coincided with the hardest moment of the recession: at the end of 1982, unemployment peaked above 10%, the highest nationally since the Great Depression, and some metropolitan areas were above 20%. Interestingly, the Simply Red version was released when the situation had become particularly dire in the UK of ‘Thatcherism’, with a high unemployment rate and a notorious social conflict. Six years ago, when the British band celebrated their thirty-year debut with special concerts, their performance of ‘Money’s Too Tight (To Mention)’ was accompanied, on giant screens, by images of the miners’ strike that shook the world. country in 1984 and 1985.
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