#418: Dire Straits, ‘Brothers in Arms’

WARNER BROS., 1985

Mark Knopfler is a real dreamy music man for me. His album, “All The Roadrunning” with Emmylou Harris melts me. So, thank you, Mr. Knopfler, for that. 

This album though…I DON’T GET IT! It was the 5th of six albums he did with Dire Straits and is their most commercially successful album. I don’t get it though. It was chaotic, bouncing between sincerity and cornball.

The biggest surprise for me was the many jazzy saxophone solos —- here’s looking at you, ‘Your Latest Trick’.

Here in my house, we love the sax. But this was very 1985-open shirt-blowing in the wind-making eye contact-sax playing. I didn’t love it. 

The best and biggest song to come out of this album is definitely ‘Money For Nothing’. It is the quintessential song about consumerism heralded in by the the 1980s massive middle class. The song is from the perspective of a salesman at a department store. I picture the salesman wearing an oversized suit, with a sweaty forehead and doing everything he can to sell anything to anyone. If this song sprouted arms and a human-ish body and learned how to use social media, its instagram account would be @luxurydeptstore (shoutout

Madeline Rupard

and Anne Hart for being the curators of our hearts). 

This listening experience was actually the first time I heard the original version of this song. I had only known Weird Al Yankovic’s version. I knew there was a “real” version, but after you go Weird Al, you don’t really go back.

Yankovic featured the song in his masterpiece 1989 film, UHF, about a quirky cutie man who buys a local tv channel. I have these very specific memories of sitting on the pleather green couch in my childhood family room watching this movie. The image I have in my mind is me with one leg on one sister and the other 80% of my body drooped onto my other sister.

Listening to this song, I *feel* the memory of my brothers laying on the floor, and my mom making popcorn while my dad pushed the Blockbuster rented VHS of UHF in the VCR. (Wow, three very 20th century coded acronyms side-by-side.) 

I remember being very confused about the movie’s plot but masking my confusion by matching my brothers’ laughter. Being in on the joke made me more than cool, it made me part of the family.

There’s a part in the movie where a tertiary character sawed his fingers off. The graphics were gnarly. If I remember correctly, blood sprayed out of the mans fresh nubs covering the entire set with red. My brother would stand in front of the TV blocking the image from our delicate little eyes. Looking back, I don’t know why we didn’t just fast-forward through the scene.  

The parts of the movie that are mutated into my cellular composition are the erratically placed music videos. I don’t think they had anything to do with the plot but it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to know what was happening to sit in awe over the splendor of these covers. The best one was:

Money For Nothing was blended in with the Beverly Hillbillies theme song. My tiny little brain exploded finding out that you could do that! I didn’t know you could create a medley out of things that don’t match. I was in awe and my world got bigger and bigger with every watch.

Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies felt adultish, clever and 80s and smart and all the things that felt very out of reach for myself. As a kid I never imagined myself understanding the movie or the covers but I did believe that someday, I was going to understand all of this. I was going to be part of the group.

I still feel that way with a lot of pop culture, politics and dating. I don’t know if I am ever really in on any of it, whatever “it” is.

This is a similar feeling to the one I have when I am at a Halloween party. I might be wearing a costume just like everyone else but I still feel like I’m not in the group. I am not in on it yet.

Is this what being an adult is - not totally being in on it? Or maybe being an adult is just listening to an album and realizing that some songs are fine, one is great and others are cheesy. 

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Top songs: So Far Away, Money For Nothing, Walk of Life, The Man’s Too Strong