Wealth & Money Quote by Tina Weymouth

Tina Weymouth is puncturing a rock-era myth: that real art is allergic to money. Coming out of a band like Talking Heads - a group that built an entire aesthetic on brains, groove, and design-conscious polish - she knows the pose of anti-commercial purity is often just another costume. Her respect is pointedly conditional: not for selling out, but for making money "well and smartly". That phrasing smuggles in craft and strategy. It's admiration for artists who can translate idiosyncratic vision into something people will actually pay for, without pretending that popularity is a moral failure.

The subtext is practical, almost infrastructural. Weymouth frames commerce less as temptation than as circulation: money is the system that keeps studios open, tours staffed, instruments repaired, time freed up to create. When she says "keeps the world going and running", she's widening the lens beyond individual success to the ecology around art - managers, venues, engineers, designers, even the audiences whose wages become ticket sales. It's an argument that cultural production is labor, not magic, and labor has bills.

That careful hedge - "in a sense" - matters. It signals she isn't romanticizing capitalism; she's refusing a simplistic villain. In the late 70s and 80s, when punk credibility and corporate-era pop were locked in a noisy feud, Weymouth's line reads like a calm refusal to cosplay poverty. It's a musician insisting that intelligence includes understanding the marketplace, not being owned by it.