Monday Morning Mixtape 071: Guillotines for Every Billionaire

Welcome to Monday Morning Mixtape, a PoYB Contributor-curated playlist of songs, made just for you at the start of each week.

"Guillotines for Every Billionaire"

Songs about getting rich, making stacks, and fucking over your small-time enemies

chosen by Sunny

Spotify

YouTube

"C.R.E.A.M. (CASH RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME)" by Kassa Overall

from CREAM, 2025

This song hits such well worn grooves that I need neither lyric nor classic beat to hear it all play in my head. Indeed, Cash does Rule Everything around Me. Cash is King. Which makes me sad to say. The biggest life-errors I and others around me have made have been in the moonshot pursuit of either sex (which usually ends in some sort of humorous situation) or money (which usually ends in some sort of tragic situation).  —Sunny

"Cents Cents Money Money" by Blowout

from No Beer, No Dad, 2016

I feel like sometimes I get too invested in dumb bullshit, like the excitement about a new idea leads me down a path that ends with me getting disappointed in some way. I'm not saying this happens with every path I choose but it happens a lot, enough in my life that I can now recognize patterns, and... well, I don't know, not so much avoid them, yet, but maybe imagine a world in which I can recognize them clearly enough and in enough time so that I can avoid it. Sometimes I think about having more money, and how that would bulldoze many of the barriers in my life and how I would ideally like to live it. But there's recently the cold realization that money wouldn't change anything, it would only expedite the process. I would reach the end move quickly, and crash land from a greater height.  —Joe

"Arkansas Diamond" by Waylon Wyatt

from Til the Sun Goes Down EP, 2024

How are you at letting go of toxic friends? There's a guy who I became somewhat friends with when I looked as his apartment a few years ago. He's a bit older, divorced, kind of a character but an alright guy. In some ways we connected. I think he thought of me as his new best friend, called a lot, not excessively, but more than I was used to. We thought about living together but in the end we didn't. After half a year of no contact, I wrote to him last week "how's it going?" "You didn't respond to my last message," he wrote, which was technically true, but he had only asked me to call him when I had time. "You don't have to respond like that," I wrote, which was probably a mistake. But he wrote back, telling me I had psychological problems and that I needed to get "diagnosed," was maybe on the spectrum, and was unmarriageable in my current state (and that any woman willing to marry me would be messed up in her own right), and that he wasn't mad, was offering up a last act of friendship before he cut me out forever. And that he'd only remain friends with me if I picked up the phone when he called or called him back within a day.  —Zach

"4 American Dollars" by U.S. Girls

from Heavy Light, 2020

Did I ever tell you about the years in grade school I spent selling shit in the cafeteria? I know time has a way of muddling memories like this but I'm relatively confident this was a years-long thing, where I would take any giveaways that my classmates were handing out—say, like, Jim McK. had a fruit cup that his mom packed but he hates fruit cups, so I would take the fruit cup and walk two tables over and try to sell the fruit cup for like a dime, or even a nickel. Small chump change shit, but it added up. Got to the point that my pencil case might be filled with $10 in loose change. And slices of pizza were $1 on Thursdays, and I was a growing boy. I don't know where I lost that profit-driven mindset. Probably when I got to high school and didn't know anybody and was too shy to sell anything or know anyone that was giving away anything in the first place. Plus, pizza was $1.50 there.  —Joe

"Juicy" by the Notorious B.I.G.

from Ready to Die, 1994

Enough time on this blog and I've come to accept that I'm hardly a connoisseur of rap and hip-hop. That's alright, I can enjoy it all the same without having deep curated knowledge. My favorite artist from the '90s is Biggie, I say without too much analysis. The man famously sang both about getting rich despite the odds, and about how being that rich has its own downfalls and setbacks. Fantastic how much better his legacy is next to producer and (maybe ex-)centimillionaire Combs.  —Sunny

"Old money bitch" by underscores

from Wallsocket, 2023

I know this sounds stupid but after my first paycheck from my new job around six months ago, I cried. Not bawling, no tears, but a half-step beyond choked up, just from the size of it. I had come off the previous six months of really hard hours at work, self-imposed, because we needed the money. It was troubling on the soul, to bear such a heavy burden in terms of hours logged in the cubicle, but we had needed the money due to strain too banal to recount in this blurb. And now I'm in a new job and I'm out of the cubicle and the money is enough that I don't have to necessarily worry like I did back then and, I dunno man, I just felt thankful that I had made it through. That's where the crying came in. Good crying. You know what I mean.  —Joe

"The (Canadian) Dollar Trilogy" by Das Sipoolaiset

from One Day You Were... the Birdwatcher, 2018

I got this message late at night, and I knew I had a night of no sleep staring me down after reading it. I called him, but he didn't pick up, asking me to "read his message first." When I go into self-protection mode, I act nice. "I am sorry for not being a better friend," I wrote. "I go to therapy." "I will call you next week."

He wrote back with a sunglasses emoji. "Call me next week!" he said. All happy and all. But every time I think about him, I think about the words he said about me, words I absolutely did not deserve, maybe the meanest message I've ever received. Yes, I should have called him back more, or been more clear about our friendship, and not gotten defensive when he initially responded about not being in touch for six months, but that? Absolutely inexcusable to talk to a friend that way. And still I find myself wanting to prove myself to him, that I am somehow worthy, that I am a good friend. But I know I'm worthy. I know he's got his issues that make him talk like that. Maybe he's in love with me. Maybe he's just lonely and feels abandonment.  —Zach

"Summer Money" by Teenage Halloween

from Teenage Halloween, 2020

I know that sounds stupid because the hardship we went through in 2025 was, like, absolutely fucking nothing compared to financial hardship that people face every day, and without crying about it either. I know I'm privileged. I know that. I know that I don't know actual pain in that regard. I saw something very recently that was like "middle class people think they're struggling financially while they are out here affording shit." We were affording shit, it's true. Any financial hardship I've felt in my life has been self-imposed. In college I would go to the campus ministry and ask them to fill up my bags with canned goods, and they did and I really didn't have enough money for food, but I easily could have just called my parents and they would've transferred like hundreds of dollars into my account instantly, for food, I mean c'mon. I grew up privileged. I like to think that I work hard because of that privilege, because I'm embarrassed by it, because I refuse to lean on it on purpose. Of course this means that I have so much help in my life. But it also means that the pain I felt having to work long hours to not go into debt to pay for emergency home repairs was real. I felt that. And I don't really feel it too often recently, which is real too.  —Joe

"$$$$" by Desaparecidos

from Read Music/Speak Spanish, 2002

There's a bank on Red Lion Rd. in the NEast that I always used to point to when I was a little kid and would say that I want to own a house as big as that. And it is a big building, and it does look like a building where a rich person would live. But that's fucking embarrassing, man. I'm embarrassed whenever I see that bank on the way to BJ's Wholesalers. Embarrassed because that's not what being rich is. I've seen It's a Wonderful Life dozens of times, the lesson is pretty clear at this point. It's so fucking clear that it's almost fucking unimaginable how other people on this earth cannot grasp it. How can you own billions of dollars and still pretend that you're happy? I can't fathom the how or the why. I read a great interview with Broken Social Scene frontman Kevin Drew a few days ago, and he was talking about how in like ten years we're going to measure empathy as a sign of success in our society. Feels like pie-in-the-sky shit, or maybe something he believes in order to survive. I want to believe it too. Because I'm tired of living in a world in which little kids see big bank buildings and want to own houses that look like that.  —Joe

"Bootstraps" by Abigail Osborn

a single, 2026

So now I sit here. I haven't called him. I don't usually "break up" with friends. Part of me wants to call him. But I feel so wounded that what's the point? And yet the voice in my head. "Don't call, don't abandon." But fuck that. I don't need him in my life. This is the classic case of cutting out toxic people. What does he offer me as a friend? (I have been to some fun events with him.) Why does it have to be transactional? Why can't I cut out toxic people from my life? Why am I afraid to do it? And yet I know it's the right thing to do. I wonder if I'll follow through. I think I have to. He is a bad person for me right now, and I don't know if there's any redemption coming to our friendship, especially with the threat of more nasty messages hanging over my head. I could just tell him I'm not ready for a call this particular week. But is it enough?  —Zach

"Love, Hate, Revenge" by Episode Six

a single, 1967

I don't know if killing all billionaires would solve all our problems. It might be a great place to start. But I also fear that it would be a band-aid on a giant gaping wound in the human species. Maybe if we woke up tomorrow and all billionaires had been killed, there would be a new class of multi-millionaires ready to step up and fill their shoes and we'd still be in the same predicament. I'd love to live in a world where resources are divided fairly. I know that's asking too much of those who have more than average. I can say that I would give up so much for the benefit of others and I can mean it, but I also acknowledge that I'm one of the freaks and that it'll take so much more than me typing bullshit on a fucking blog to make any difference in this fucked world.  —Joe

"Moneytalks" by AC/DC

from The Razors Edge, 1990

I've heard this song so many times over so many years. I saw AC/DC at a Coachella and I think they played it then, but my memory isn't great. I don't really get it; feels like they did the same sonic structure better in other songs. And I've gone back and forth thinking the lyrics are ironic or unironic. Funny when you duckduckgo.com search "Moneytalks" the first hit isn't this song, but more about moneytalking.

Money does talk, no? It can be literal Magic, getting someone to do something they wouldn't otherwise through its presence. Quite unlike Talk, which is phenomenally cheap, maybe even so overwhelming in this day and age that I need to hire someone in a jumpsuit to cart it away regularly. That's probably because the average person I hear has a lot Talk and not a lot of Money, and so they do what they do with what they can. I can relate.  —Sunny

NEXT WEEK: "Sensory Overload" — Songs for the five senses: see, hear, smell, taste, and feel (chosen by Joe)