Wealth & Money Quote by Lynette Fromme

The line lands like a shiv aimed at the romance of artistic freedom: if you have to show up on cue and deliver a product, you are not “above money,” you are simply employed. Fromme’s phrasing is deliberately plain, almost bureaucratic, which is part of the bite. “Given times and places” reduces performance to shift work; “produce what sells” frames creativity as inventory; “whether they believe in it or not” is the moral twist, implying that sincerity is optional once signatures are on paper. Then the kicker: “It depends on contracts.” Not inspiration, not community, not integrity - paperwork.

Fromme isn’t an arts critic; she’s a notorious Manson follower, a figure associated with coercion, loyalty tests, and the mechanics of control. That context makes the quote feel less like an innocent observation and more like a worldview: people talk about ideals, but systems of obligation decide behavior. Contracts become the respectable version of captivity - consensual, legal, enforceable. The subtext is that autonomy is often theater, especially inside industries that monetize identity.

There’s also a sly reversal of the usual accusation that artists “sell out.” Fromme suggests the sellout isn’t a personal failure so much as an institutional design. The intent isn’t to defend musicians; it’s to puncture their self-mythology and remind you that modern culture runs on compliance disguised as choice. In that sense, it’s a grimly effective sentence: it weaponizes common sense to make cynicism sound like realism.