‘That ain’t workin’ is more a reference to the fact that Motley Crue was able to make millions of dollars (and get endless groupies) without doing actual work. They’d play music 2 hours a day, 4 days a week on tour and make a ton of money. I believe the backstory of the song is that a musician in dire straits saw some appliance movers at a store watching a Motley Crue video and he listened to their conversation about how easy guys in bands like Motley Crue had it.
When I read Motley Crue’s biography, I found out that 3 of the 4 main members were chronically suicidal (Mick, Vince and Nikki were all pretty depressed suicidal people). Only Tommy wasn’t always trying to kill himself (but he sank pretty close to suicide when he ended up in jail). So even with all that money and all the groupies they were still pretty miserable people.
Straitjacket. Like…umm…pertinently enough, the name of the band.
Though many words like “faggot” are pointed to as markers of the backwards attitudes of the people who lived way back in the 80’s, they were often used (in the case of Money For Nothing, clearly) to parody those backwards attitudes, or in a progressive effort to banalise them. The snap judgments projecting bacwards attitudes onto people who used those words, no matter the context, came much later.
I’ve always imagined that Knopfler’s appliance store was Crazy Eddie’s. “I mean, this guy has a grudging respect for rock stars. He sees it in terms of, well, that’s not working and yet the guy’s rich: that’s a good scam. He isn’t sneering.”
Crazy Eddie’s was a stereo/TV/appliance store in the New York area: according to their TV and radio ads, “Our prices are insane.”
Their prices were so low, that they drove other retailers out of business, for example Tech HiFi. Bring an ad into their store and they would beat the price. How did they provide such low-low prices? Fraud. First they faked their books to avoid paying sales taxes. Then they cleaned up their books for 3 years, floated an IPO, and ripped off their stock market investors. Then they went to jail. Sordid tale here: Crazy Eddie Fraud
Anyway, they chose their workers carefully. They had a certain attitude, not an altogether unpleasant one. One of them told me there was a better ad I could bring in if I wanted to: try the Village Voice he said.