Early Dire Straits was completely awesome. Later Dire Straits was somewhat less awesome, because the ratio of sweet upbeat tunes ("Lady Writer", "Sultans of Swing", "Tunnel of Love") to brooding introspective tunes (everything else) plummeted. Knopfler's solo stuff is almost all the dark, quiet stuff. Yes, it's very good, but there's only so much of it I can take. I have to have an upbeat song here and there to break it up or I just want to kill myself.
I remember being extremely dissapointed when I read the lyrics to Money for Nothing on the Money for Nothing greatest hits CD, and realised they'd cut a whole verse about a "faggot with the earring and the makeup" from the album. I'd never heard it at the time. On that subject, who were they talking about? I remember reading it somewhere, but have forgotten.
The story goes: Mark Knopfler was in a store one time, and the TVs were all tuned to MTV. This was the 80's, back when MTV still played music videos, and their slogan was "I want my MTV". Two delivery guys had stopped to watch MTV for a few, and he found their conversation interesting. One of them used an expression he'd never heard before and thought was kinda cool, "That's the way you do it!" So the whole song is the comments these guys were making while watching videos on MTV. They have to move microwave ovens, refrigerators, etc., while some faggot with an earring and makeup playing guitar on MTV is a millionaire with his own jet.
That second verse is practically the crux of the social comment, but it was deemed offensive and was cut from the "short version" of the song.
