How Pink Floyd's 'Money' Used 7/4 Time and a Cash Register Loop to Mock Greed

Most rock songs stick to 4/4 time. “Money” opens in 7/4 — seven beats per bar instead of the usual four — and that lopsided, stumbling rhythm is the first clue that something’s off. The band built that groove around a loop of clinking coins, a cash register drawer slamming, and the sound of paper tearing, all recorded on a primitive tape machine. David Gilmour played his bass line to that loop, and the result feels like a drunken shuffle through a bank vault. The irregular meter makes you uncomfortable even if you can’t name why, which is exactly the point: capitalism doesn’t work on a clean, steady beat.

The song’s middle section switches to 4/4 for the saxophone solo, played by session musician Dick Parry. That shift feels like a sudden, euphoric release — a brief moment of fluency and freedom inside the clunky money-machine. Parry’s solo is bluesy, soulful, and almost sarcastic in its smoothness, as if the sax is the one voice that can float above the cash-register clatter. Then the time signature snaps back to 7/4, and the grind resumes. It’s a tiny structural joke: money buys you a nice solo, but you’re still trapped in the odd meter.

Roger Waters wrote the lyrics as a direct attack on greed and the music industry’s obsession with profit. Lines like “Money, it’s a gas” and “grab that cash with both hands and make a stash” are sung with a smirk, but the tape-loop chaos underneath is anything but celebratory. Every clink and click is a reminder that the system itself is off-balance. The sax solo doesn’t solve anything — it just highlights how hollow the freedom feels when the rhythm never quite settles.