Wealth & Money Quote by Thurston Moore

Moore’s line lands like a shrug with teeth: a working musician telling you the truth he’s not supposed to say out loud. In three short beats, he punctures the fantasy that rock is a reliable escalator to wealth, names the tiny handful who beat the odds, then drags the conversation back to the present tense: “We don’t sell any records anymore.” It’s gallows humor, but also a corrective aimed at anyone who still thinks the scene runs on record sales and label checks.

The Black Sabbath reference does double duty. It’s not just a salute to a titan; it’s a deliberately absurd benchmark. Sabbath isn’t a peer group, it’s a lottery winner with a merchandise empire, catalog dominance, and decades of mythmaking behind it. By invoking them, Moore sketches the brutal distribution curve of music money: most artists scrape, a few become brands, and the gap is the story.

Context matters here: Moore came up through the underground economy where credibility was currency and compromise was suspicion. But he’s also speaking from the post-Napster, streaming-era collapse of the album as a paycheck. “Records” becomes shorthand for an entire system of valuation that dissolved while everyone pretended it didn’t. The subtext isn’t self-pity; it’s a warning and a quiet flex. If the money isn’t coming from units moved, then the reason to keep making abrasive, uncompromising art has to be something sturdier than profit: identity, community, obsession, survival.