Wealth & Money Quote by Wayne Coyne

It lands like a shrug, but it’s a small manifesto about taste, money, and the quiet power of opting out. Wayne Coyne’s line takes the supposedly massive machinery of pop economics and reduces it to a single household decision: “us” as a tiny market unit refusing to be monetized. The joke isn’t that Cat Stevens is bad; it’s that even someone as beloved and accessible as Cat Stevens can’t squeeze profit from listeners who won’t play the game.

The “Anyway” matters. It’s a conversational reset, a quick pivot away from whatever earnest debate came before. Coyne uses that casualness to smuggle in a worldview: the idea that cultural consumption is full of invisible negotiations. Buying the record, buying the ticket, buying into the myth. By naming Cat Stevens, he picks a symbol of gentle, humane singer-songwriter authenticity, which makes the punchline sharper. If even the saint of mellow can’t “make much money” off you, you’re positioning yourself outside the normal moral pressure to support artists through conventional channels.

There’s also a wink at the absurdity of counting pennies in art. “Make much money out of us” frames the artist-fan relationship in blunt commercial terms, puncturing the romance. Coming from Coyne, whose own band has long trafficked in big-hearted spectacle and indie credibility, it reads like self-aware gallows humor: we love music, we’re moved by it, and we still might not pay for it the way the industry wants. That tension is the context, and the line thrives on refusing to resolve it.