Money seem to cry when I save it and always seem to leave my account when I make it
Never seen eyes like the ones on your face, I couldn’t hide what I tried fakin'
She want the London life, but she won’t ever pay the London price
I don’t even stay in London, right, but please just give it to me one more time
although i generally try to stay away from external analyses of the music i listen to, save for when i’ve already established some kind of point that i’m confident standing behind and want to actively challenge it, i simply couldn’t let go of this one analysis of london life that i saw on youtube. while i don’t necessarily agree with every point made, i do think that alexandra did a great job at kind of opening my eyes to the extended metaphor that the song embodies, the love for the person the speaker obsesses over, and how it’s sort of meant to represent an intense desire. i don’t think that fakemink is too known for making revolutionary points in his music, and sometimes i’d even argue that he’s lowkey fake deep on his music in an effort to uphold the irresistible model/underground rapper/philosopher shroud that makes him cool, a modern rockstar that everyone wants to be. that being said, i do want to expand on the point of desire made by alexandra’s analysis. i want to clarify that i’m mostly just writing my raw thoughts, and this really isn’t meant to be any kind of formal analysis or critique to her video, but rather i just want to acknowledge that my thoughts on the song stem from this theme of desire that got brought up.
for what it’s worth, i think that the album london’s saviour as a whole has way deeper themes than people give it credit for. i think that fakemink can sometimes take himself too seriously nowadays with how he’s blowing up and grinding away at his career, and while i certainly can’t hate on him for trying to speak about broader themes in what is otherwise a rap underground known for being unserious, i think that he ironically spoke a lot more deeply about his life’s issues in his earlier work before he blew up and deliberately assumed this modern philosopher persona sometime around 2025. not that he can’t be deep in his music nowadays, but this album more than anything exemplifies that early hunger that he had, and it’s this authentic genius that i think he’s currently struggling to integrate into his current music. as put by this otherwise funny ass youtube comment that speaks to how his music is perceived nowadays:
anyway, besides the fact that i needed an excuse to show off that hilarious comment, i’ve been talking about all this because i wanted to sort of set the context of fakemink’s early career, one that to me is governed by that hunger ’to make it’ in life and the emotional rawness of a hollow, scary city life that will chew you up and leave you more misguided than before. this album is sort of the culmination of that london misfit edginess, and it’s a bit ludicrous to even consider this to be an ’early’ work of fakemink’s; he’s been grinding away at his music career for 8 years before this album was even released in 2023.
yap yap yap, why does this song stick out from the album anyway?
now that you’ve had time to appreciate my preamble ramble, i think a good place to start would be with the title london life. i was like ok, for an album named london’s saviour, i guess it would make sense that fakemink is going to shoutout his influence in the london underground scene, so naturally i expected the lyrics of the song to be full of the glamor of the city life. drugs, money, sex, whatever, it’s undeniably fun and catchy to fantasize about the high life with lyrics that aren’t really meant to mean anything. at the start of the page, i put the chorus of the song, not just because it’s catchy and repeated so much throughout the song (those four lines are repeated three to four times ish), but also because it feels so strangely cryptic in the context of the rest of the album. the earlier songs were somewhat more direct in comparison, and often made references to the high-end city life: designer clothes and the paranoia of a drug rush in kill everything, the ‘made it to the top’ bravado and cold weather/jewelry comparison in just kitten, and the on-top-of-the-world feeling of the speaker’s expensive cocaine rush in air head. the pace of each one of those songs also feels a lot faster in comparison, and i guess to me it’s analogous to that glamor rush that the speaker gets as he’s conquering london. but then london life sort of takes a break and slows down things by a lot more, and the album to me really starts getting a lot more reflective after the speaker comes to acknowledge his obsession with this city glamor in this song.
i think there needs to be an entire discussion on the interweaved instrumental breaks scattered in-between the lyrical songs, being phantas-ma-goria, fleeting feeling (the one that precedes london life), and one more, then i’ll sleep, but alas i’ll only briefly touch on fleeting feeling since it’s the most relevant here. i’m a sucker for this instrumental, and if i’m being honest i don’t really feel like i can take away as much from london life if i don’t start with this instrumental first, and it was clearly designed to be a slowed down, alternative instrumental of london life that uses the exact same melody in order to transition smoothly. like i said, it’s a slowed down version of the instrumental, and i think it’s really meant for us to slow down after the rapid, paranoid lyrics in air head.
something that i do that’s kind of weird is that i like to associate songs and albums with a particular time of the day. i don’t think it’s based on anything concrete, but rather just the vibe that i get from listening to the piece, or rather the time that i would picture myself enjoying the music the most. if i had to give a couple of examples, i’d say that bladee’s red light album is an early morning kind album, not early-riser but rather insomniac-who-stayed-up-too-late. maybe you also haven’t heard of this one, but social distortion’s song story of my life, which is written from the perspective of man looking back at his wasted opportunities in life sort of longingly (what a strange word), is a sunset song, the conclusion of a wasted day bringing to me a similar bout of sadness and reminiscence like in the song. does that make sense? to me, london’s saviour is a midnight album, naturally because i tend to associate the glamor of city life with the midnight, where our lovely human vices can run rampantly since we’re less inhibited and can just sleep off our sins into the morning.
in that sense, fleeting feeling is like taking a break to stare around in awe at the city, kind of like taking a midnight walk to a convenience store and just admiring all the lights, people outside partying, the bustling traffic of a city that genuinely never takes a break. london life, then, turns this state of mental awe into words. and how, you ask, do i know that? well, as it turns out, i’ve actually walked through london at night and can attest to this fleeting moment of appreciation for a city whose nighttime is similarly fleeting.
you’re just using big words and omg you’re not even from london shut up
yeah ok fair point, but that’s how i interpreted the context of the song if nothing else :p
with the more than reasonable assumption that the speaker is heterosexual, he opens up by talking about the fleeting nature of money and the fleeting obsession he has for a woman that i’m going to assume he just met. the instrumental is cloudy, hazy, nostalgic, and as someone who is obsessed with the emotional intensity that a good synth in a song can bring, the first repetition of the chorus (as in he just says the first four lines again) intensifies the speaker’s obsession for fleeting money and love.
a good point that was made by alexandra in her youtube video is that the outro sequence where the speaker keeps repeating “let’s stay together till we die” is kind of like repeating a phrase to yourself in the mirror over and over to try and manifest something into reality. besides the fact that this repetition is a nice way of making a catchy song with simple lyrics that the listener can repeat, i’m somehow convinced that the speaker’s repetition of the same 8 lines throughout the song (the only ones he doesn’t repeat are the 4 unique lines of the only verse in the song, to be talked about later) is meant to convey his surface level obsession with money and a woman. again, fakemink throughout this album repeats a lot of lines and verses throughout the album, but the fact that this song boasts so little content and was stretched to 3 minutes and 33 seconds (omg don’t double those numbers!!!!) somehow makes me feel like it was a deliberate creative decision, originality be damned. as for the chorus itself, it becomes apparent that the speaker’s rose-tinted obsession with the woman is conflated with our societal obsession with money.
Money seem to cry when I save it and always seem to leave my account when I make it
if money isn’t being spent, it sits idly in our wallets and bank accounts and cries as if begging to be spent. however, it’s bittersweet to us when it leaves, and in a way the money has some kind of autonomy when it leaves by itself the second we make it? obviously that could just be the personification of the money, but i think there’s something to be said about how we perceive our money as begging to leave when that’s actually how we, city folk, people living in capitalism, are perceiving the money. to the speaker, money appears sentient and can even grow legs and walk out of his bank account, so-to-say, but it’s just the worldview that we have cultivated. if you were to picture a fun night out right now, you’d definitely imagine some kind of way of spending money? or even if you were just walking around a city center with your friends, the bright lights of advertisements and the irresistible idea of owning a new and shiny toy, it’s as if everything around you is causing your head to go: spend, spend, spend. we cry when we save our money because we can’t spend it, and the accumulation of wealth just isn’t feasible for the average person. money is meant to be fleeting for us to stay confined to our socioeconomic latter, lest you want to haggle over literally making a few pennies by putting the few hundred or thousands you have in a savings account. whether we like it or not, we can’t resist spending, and there’s no reason to cultivate an stagnant plant that won’t grow when we can just spend it to taste the sweetness of the fruit it reaps. it’s not really a sustainable system, and deep down we know that something is wrong even if we don’t realize it, a zero sum game where we can only conquer the night in which we go out.
Never seen eyes like the ones on your face, I couldn’t hide what I tried fakin’
while it could literally just sound like a not so original, trite compliment that the speaker gives to a woman, in a sense it just represents that aforementioned desire to possess a new, shiny toy. the capitalistic sentiment of the earlier line kind of sets up the commodification of women at the hands of the male gaze, furthered by the ritualistic mating dance that he had tried faking, almost as if resisting the urge to give into his obsession and go after the woman but ultimately being unable to resist.
She want the London life, but she won’t ever pay the London price
this line sort of confuses me, and it’s probably because i’ve kind of tunnel visioned myself into this particular reading of the first two lines, but i guess if nothing else we can suppose that it’s a statement on the impossibility of realizing our desires due to their high cost. if we’re being a bit literal, london is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world, and while we can certainly keep dreaming of what would be a life of city glamor, our capitalistic system simply isn’t designed to grow money from nothing. it’s not that she isn’t willing to pay the London price right now, the cost of living a life of glamor, but rather that she can’t and never will. then again, it costs us nothing to picture ourselves in london, or any ideal position in life that we probably won’t ever attain. so long as we have bread and circus, we will be entertained enough to keep dreaming about something we can’t realize.
or rather, what if it’s not about a woman who longs about living a life that she can’t afford? instead, i think another reading of this would be the fact that the speaker is almost trying to buy the love of this woman in order to fulfill his obsession, and when asked what it will take to convince her, she sees through the nonsense the speaker gives and wants to use him to perhaps fulfill this impossible dream of living in london. of course, maybe she could also be interested and simply want to go out on a romantic night in london to experience this life of a queen even if it’s just for one night. undeniably, parts of london at night could create really pretty scenery that is conducive of romance, but it’s pretty evident that the woman realizes her worth and isn’t going to pay a dime on that night out. do you want me that bad? can you afford to take me out? she’s certainly combating the speaker’s obsessive, surface level love, with the materialistic gain of fulfilling the impossible dream of living the city life. so commercial.
I don’t even stay in London, right, but please just give it to me one more time
need i say more? the speaker can’t afford to be in london, and the “right” almost feels like he is responding to someone calling him out on this fact. at least he realizes that his love is just a desire to be with the woman one more time. give what exactly to him one more time? your guess is as good as mine: her attention, sex, the fantasy of city life? these lines almost read like they came from the perspective of an addict, someone who won’t let anything stand in the way of a high even if they have no money left, someone who just wants to have it one more time and let the worries come afterward.
anyway, this little bit on my thoughts on the song has gone far beyond a tiny little bit, so i’ll probably leave it here for now until i revisit it in the future. while most of it was random rambling, i hope that it’s at least some kind of food for thought :-) it was a lot of fun writing this…but i also know my limits!
Last modified on 2026-08-07