Wealth & Money Quote by Solomon Burke

Burke’s line lands like a quiet confession of strategy inside a romanticized story we usually tell about soul music: the artist as pure voice, the label as dream factory, the hit record as emotional currency. He’s talking about currency in the literal sense. “Using the record as a tool” reframes art as leverage, a portable asset you can convert into deeds and acreage. It’s a businessman’s sentence delivered in an artist’s cadence, and that tension is the point.

The context is the post-Civil Rights South, a region “changing” in ways that were both newly possible and newly predatory. Desegregation, new federal enforcement, and migration patterns shifted who could buy, build, and own. Real estate was (and is) where power hardens. Burke’s subtext: if you’re a Black performer whose labor is routinely underpaid, your smartest move is to get out of the royalty hamster wheel and into something that can’t be quietly “recalculated” by an accountant. Property doesn’t care about radio programmers or fickle charts.

There’s also a bracing critique of the music industry embedded in the pragmatism. If records are merely “tools,” then the industry’s mythology of authenticity starts to look like a sales pitch that keeps artists grateful while others get wealthy. Burke is mapping a different kind of Southern ambition: not escape, but acquisition. He isn’t describing greed so much as a countermove - taking a cultural product that was often exploited and converting it into generational footholds while the ground was shifting.