Wealth & Money Quote by Melissa Auf der Maur

There is a punk practicality to this line: it treats money not as a finish line but as fuel, and it refuses the polite fantasy that “grown-up” wealth management is neutral. “Stocks? No.” lands like a snare hit, a deliberately blunt rejection of the approved script for success. The cadence matters: short sentences, hard pivots, no softening. It’s the sound of someone who has watched creative people get told to be grateful, cash the check, and quietly disappear into “responsible” choices.

Auf der Maur’s intent feels twofold. First, she’s staking out identity. If the world is going to translate artistic credibility into a bank balance, she’s going to translate that bank balance back into art. Second, she’s asserting control over the terms of value. Investing in stocks is framed as abstract, distant, and morally weightless; investing in music is intimate, risky, and accountable. The subtext: I don’t trust systems that reward me while asking me to stop being who I am.

Context sharpens the edge. Coming from a working musician in the post-alternative era, it’s a rebuttal to the “sellout” anxiety and the industry’s churn. You can hear the lived experience of watching catalog rights, touring revenue, and culture itself get financialized by people who don’t write songs. Her answer is to financialize herself on her own terms: reinvest in recording, touring, gear, collaborators, maybe a label, maybe a scene.

It’s not anti-money; it’s anti-detachment. The flex is using profit to buy more risk.