Wealth & Money Quote by Robert Wyatt

The sting here is how casually Wyatt drops the mythology of the golden age. No romantic haze, no rock-and-roll rags-to-riches arc just a flat, exhausted accounting: we made the work, someone else pocketed the value. The plainness is the point. By refusing poetic phrasing, he makes exploitation sound like admin, which is exactly how it survives.

Wyatt is talking about a familiar 60s/70s music-business setup: young bands signing away rights, opaque royalty statements, managers and labels treating artists like renewable raw material. "We did not get any money" lands as a collective grievance, not a lone sob story. It gestures toward a whole class of musicians who powered a cultural revolution while lacking even basic leverage inside it. The subtext is that the counterculture had its own accountants and fixers, and they were often more ruthless than the straights the music supposedly rebelled against.

Calling it "crooked managers" is direct, but "a gangster's paradise" is the rhetorical twist. He isn't saying the industry is merely unfair; he's saying it's structurally hospitable to predation. The metaphor does double work: it paints managers as organized crime and suggests a legal system that quietly blesses the theft as long as contracts are signed and paperwork looks clean.

Wyatt's intent feels less like revenge than a warning flare. The quote strips prestige from the machine and, in doing so, asks why we still treat exploitation as the admission price for art.