“Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can.”
Imagine sucking my pustular stump, ya Scouse git.
As a thought exercise on the side, here, how many rock musicians (excluding rappers) have ever written songs wherein they admit to being rich? Because the only one I can think of is Joni Mitchell.
johnny cash sang the line, “iv’e been everywhere man.” does that count?
brian wilson sang the lines, “i’m a real cool head, i’m making real good bread, i get around…”
Joe Walsh, Life’s Been Good to Me So Far
ABBA’s “Money Money Money.” By the time they recorded it, they were richer than God.
Are you kidding? Nirvana lyrics don’t even make sense*! And if they did, he’d probably sing about how he hated being rich and famous and wished everyone would just leave him alone.
*“I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black” <— interesting, yet nonsensical
Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight”
Poor man’s son from across the railroad track
Only shirt I own is hangin’ off my back
Kris Kristofferson’s claim to have “nothing left to lose”. Janis Joplin’s, too.
Mac Davis’ “In the Ghetto” - right, as if HE knew what it’s like.
Dire Straights’ “Money for Nothing” with tongue planted firmly in cheek
Performers performs – that’s what they do. Writers (of fiction, songs, or whatever) create a character – hopefully convincingly. The singer or actor fleshes out that character.
Joan Baez doesn’t even come close to being a Civil War-era railroad engineer – but she persuades you to suspend your disbelief and listen to his story as she tells it first person. Very few successful Top-40 singers over the 60 years of my lifetime have actually been insecure pimply angst-ridden lovelorn teenagers – but most of them have done a fair-to-middling job of evoking that persona for their listeners who are to identify with.
Tom Hanks was neither an astronaut, a gay lawyer, nor a developmentally disabled man who met nearly every famous person over a 20-year span. What he was, was an actor with the talent to make one accept him as the character he was portraying. The exact same concept applies to a singer and the persona behind the song.
Ben Folds – Free Coffee:
When I was broke, I needed it more.
But now that I’m rich, they give me coffee.
Or this classic Ben Folds lyric, from a song I can’t remember the title of:
I’m really not complaining; I realize it’s just a job.
And I hate hearing belly-aching rock stars whine and sob.
'Cause I could be busing tables. I could well be pumping gas.
But I get paid much finer for playing piano and kissing ass.
In his defense, Lennon often changed the line to “I wonder if we can” when he preformed it.
And in Davis’ (and Presley’s) defense, that song was all in the third person (except for the part about people like us not seeing people like them). The singer wasn’t saying he was poor just that there were poor people out there.
That’s “One Down”, from the Ben Folds Live album, talking about how unhappy he was with his contract.
Cher probably wasn’t really born in the wagon of a travelling show to a mama who had to dance for the money they’d throw.
Heart Shaped Box is clearly talking about what an evil bitch Courtney Love is and is paen (sp?) to their diseased love. It’s not linear but it does make sense. It’s about the imagery man. It’s a painting, it’s visual. 
A few weeks ago, Law and Order: SVU featured the murder of a “ghetto” rapper who rapped about his drug dealing & pimping past. When Ice-T called him on it, he sheepishly admitted he grew up in a gated community in Connecticut.
Does that kind of story apply to any real life rappers?
“Real World” by Big And Rich
“Poor Boy” by Elvis Presley
Bob Dylan built a whole career on transforming himself into the Second Coming of Woody Guthrie, even though he was basically a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota.
These days he’s Cowboy Bob – always with the hat, always out in the desert somewhere.
I don’t really believe he was “Pacing around the room, hoping maybe she’ll come back. Praying for salvation, laying around in a one-room country shack” on 1997’s “Dirt Road Blues.” By that time he’d been earning a jillion dollars a month doing the Neverending Tour since 1989. But I still love that song.
Yet IIRC many of the artists mentioned in this thread probably had their very lean years – including Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Mark Knopfler and John Denver. My ex-girlfriend’s mom always swore they put John Denver up in their place in northern Pennsylvania when he was a bum either before or during his Chad Mitchell Trio days, and I have no way to verify it but no reason to doubt it either.
I understand even Mariah Carey had her starvation days – although I picture her taking the Scarlett O’Hara approach: “I don’t care who I have to blow, even if it’s Tommy Mottola at Sony Records, I’ll never be poor again!” And it worked!
So they can conjure up whatever they want when they write a song. Just make a good song out of it.
OK, I’ll shut up now. Sorry for the hijack.
No, but she and Sonny were dirt poor when they recorded “I Got You Babe” - supposedly the money they got from that one stopped an eviction process.
They were poor when they wrote it - now when they perform it they change “a million bucks” to “a billion bucks”, so points for honesty.
As well as Janis’s plea for the Lord to buy her a Mercedes-Benz.