Wealth & Money Quote by Sun Ra

Sun Ra is doing two things at once here: puncturing the marble pedestal of “great composers,” and defending his own right to be weird on purpose. By dragging Bach and Beethoven into the room, he’s not diminishing their craft so much as reminding you who paid the bills. The line “upper structure” is classic Ra vocabulary: slightly sci-fi, slightly Marx, a phrase that makes patronage sound like architecture you’re forced to live inside. It turns the concert hall into a power grid.

The intent is to demystify “genius” as something that floats above history. Bach’s church job, Beethoven’s aristocratic patrons, the whole ecosystem of commissions and courts: Sun Ra points to the bargain beneath the beauty. Even the most revered music is, in part, customer service for people with money and control. He’s not saying the work is fake; he’s saying it was negotiated.

The subtext lands harder in jazz, where “pleasing” often meant satisfying club owners, record labels, segregated audiences, and critics who wanted Black innovation without Black autonomy. Sun Ra’s project was the opposite: build an alternative institution (his Arkestra, his mythos, his costumes) that could resist that “upper structure” by becoming its own world.

Context matters: speaking from mid-century America, he’s calling out how culture gets canonized, then used as proof that the system is fair. His point is blunt: art history is also labor history, and every masterpiece has a patron lurking in the wings.