Initially, I didn’t set out to write a song. I set out to create a set of affirmations that would deliberately challenge every negative belief I had around earning money and money itself — every choke point I could find. But somewhere along the way, I decided to put all of those choke points into a song under the banner of Easy Money, designed to change my own relationship with money — and potentially that of anyone who listens to it — from the ground up
No meditation music. No bloke in a linen shirt telling you to manifest a million pounds. No repeating “I am rich” into a mirror while your brain quietly replies, “Yeah… but you’re not.” 😂 I wanted something different. I wanted to build the idea into the music itself. And that’s where “I’m Easy Money” came from.
The Caravan in Paderne
The funny thing is, I didn’t write Easy Money from a position of having loads of money. I wrote it while I was pretty much broke, living in a little caravan in Paderne, tucked back from the Algarve coast in Portugal. Paderne isn’t one of those polished, tourist-heavy places. It’s quiet, rural and has a completely different feel from the main coastal resorts.
I’d ended up working as a groundskeeper at a small caravan park, strimming grass and doing whatever little jobs needed doing. In return, the owner let me stay in one of the caravans for free. She was an Irish woman in her eighties — about 85, as I remember it — and she was still operating at about 100 miles an hour all day long. I’d actually be telling her to slow down. 😂
She had that very traditional Irish attitude towards work, and I remember her saying to me, “You have to work, Francois.”
It was funny, but that sentence also represented something much deeper. I’d heard versions of it my entire life: you have to work, money doesn’t grow on trees, if you want something you’ve got to graft for it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with work or effort. Work creates value, skills matter and building something usually requires action. But underneath that was another belief I’d inherited — that money itself had to be hard.
That was the belief I eventually started questioning.
Because sitting there in Portugal, I was experiencing a strange contradiction. I was free but poor. I had very little money, but I had time. I had a beautiful environment, space to create and a degree of freedom that I’d never experienced inside a conventional working life. I was doing bits of work, living simply and getting on with things, but I was still carrying the old internal rule that money had to be earned through struggle.
That contradiction became the starting point for Easy Money.
The Old Money Story
I’d spent years thinking about psychology, metaphysics, philosophy, science and consciousness, and I’d also spent years writing music. So I understood the basic idea behind affirmations. Repetition can reinforce an idea, an identity or an association. But I also saw a problem with the way many affirmations are constructed.
If you’re struggling financially and start telling yourself, “I am a billionaire,” there’s an obvious potential conflict between the statement and your current experience. The further the statement is from what you currently perceive as reality, the easier it can be for the mind to reject it.
So I didn’t want to write something that prescribed a specific destination. I wanted something open.
I didn’t want to say how much money would arrive, when it would arrive, where it would come from or what mechanism would produce it. I wanted to remove the pressure of having to know how.
And eventually I landed on: I’m Easy Money.
That was different. It wasn’t “I’m going to become rich.” It wasn’t “I will make a million pounds.” It wasn’t even tied to a particular income stream. It was an identity — an orientation towards money rather than a prediction about the future. That openness became one of the most important parts of the whole concept.
Finding the Choke Points
Once I had the central idea, I started looking at my own money programming. Not what I thought I believed on the surface, but the assumptions underneath it. What were the little rules I’d absorbed over the years?
I started calling these choke points.
If the old association was money has to be hard-earned, I wrote, “I’m easy money — not hard-earned cash.” If the association was that easy money must be dodgy, I wrote, “I’m not a shady deal, not a heist or a steal.” If money was associated with stress and instability, I wrote, “I’m easy money — zero stress, zero strife.” If wealth meant selling your time, I wrote, “I don’t sell my time for money — nah.”
This is where the song stopped being a collection of positive lyrics and became something much more deliberate. Every block had a job. I’d identify an old association, reject it, replace it with a new association and then reinforce that new association with imagery. Most of the ideas are constructed in four- or six-bar blocks, so the same basic architecture keeps appearing throughout the song.
I wasn’t simply asking, “What sounds good here?” – I was asking: “What belief am I dealing with, and what do I want to put in its place?” That distinction is at the heart of Easy Money.
The Cultural Zip File
Then I realised I could make the whole thing much more powerful by using something people already carry around in their heads: pop culture.
Take the word Jedi. If you’ve experienced Star Wars, I don’t need to explain the entire concept to you. One word can trigger images of lightsabers, the Force, mastery, discipline, adventure, heroism, training and conflict. An enormous amount of information and emotional association is already stored behind that single word.
I started thinking of these references as cultural zip files. One word can unpack an entire universe. That’s why Easy Money contains references to Tony Stark, Hannibal Smith, Face Man, Harry Potter, Midas, the Golden Fleece, Jedi, the X-Wing, Andy Murray, the ten-second car, A-Train, The Boys and Maeve. They’re not there simply as decoration or name-dropping. They’re carrying associations.
The Jedi isn’t the message. The Jedi carries the message.
And this is where pop culture becomes a kind of carrier wave. The beat carries the lyrics, the lyrics carry the ideas, and the cultural references carry huge amounts of imagery that already exists inside the listener’s memory.
I’m not necessarily putting more information into every line. I’m increasing the information density of every line.
Building the Network
Science, mythology and metaphysics then became another layer of the same process. Quantum leaps, parallel realities, multiverses, the Midas touch, mythology and magic all give the song different languages for thinking about transformation and possibility.
I’m not suggesting that quantum physics scientifically proves that thinking about money makes money appear. That’s not what I’m doing. These concepts are being used as symbolic and conceptual language inside the artistic framework of the song.
What interested me was what happened when all these different systems were connected.
The central idea — I’m Easy Money — sits in the middle, surrounded by associations of freedom, peace, security, abundance, creativity, possibility, confidence, mastery, magic, adventure and value. Then the beat, rhythm, repetition and hook keep returning the listener to the same central phrase.
I wasn’t trying to plant one thought. I was trying to build an entire ecosystem around the thought. That’s when I realised Easy Money wasn’t just a song with an affirmation in it. It was an associative network.
The Trojan Horse
And that’s where the Trojan horse comes in. If I told somebody I’d created a five-minute financial identity exercise, they might not be particularly interested. 😂 But if I tell them I’ve made a rap track called Easy Money, they might press play because they like the music.
That’s the trick. You come for the beat. You come for the swagger. You come for the references. You come for the entertainment. And somewhere along the way, you’re singing: “I’m Easy Money.” . The music becomes the delivery mechanism. I didn’t want to write another affirmation. I wanted to build something that could carry an affirmation without looking like one.
That became the fundamental idea behind the Trojan horse.
From Knowing to Embodying
There was another reason this mattered to me personally. I’d already spent years thinking about abundance, consciousness, creativity and possibility. I didn’t need another intellectual argument. I was interested in the gap between knowing something intellectually and actually embodying it.
You can understand that abundance is possible and still behave according to an old scarcity programme. You can believe there are many ways to create value and still feel that you have to sell your time. You can intellectually reject an old belief while emotionally continuing to live inside it.
That was the gap Easy Money was written from. I wasn’t writing from the mountaintop. I was writing from the gap. And the song became a way of repeatedly stepping into the identity I was trying to build.
The interesting part, looking back, is that my circumstances eventually began to look very different from the ones I was living in when I wrote the song. Today I’m creating full-time, my rent is covered and I’m generating around £1,500 a month. I’m not presenting that as scientific proof that writing a song magically creates money. That’s my personal experience, not a controlled experiment.
But for me, Easy Money became part of the transition. It became the bridge between knowing and embodying.
So What Is Easy Money?
At one level, Easy Money is simply a rap track. But underneath the music is an experiment in identity, language, psychology, culture, creativity, mythology and music. I took an inherited money story and started looking for the places where it was constricting me. I identified those choke points and wrote directly against them. I wrapped the new ideas in cultural references, mythology, science and metaphysics. I built the ideas into repeated lyrical structures and then put the whole thing inside a beat.
And the result doesn’t feel like self-help.It feels like music. That’s the Trojan horse.And that’s really where SubAtomic Hip Hop begins. Music with something underneath it.
Music you can enjoy on the surface while another layer is running underneath. Not a lecture. Not a sermon. Not somebody telling you what to believe. Just an experiment:
What happens when you engineer an idea into the music itself? This is the story of Easy Money. And there’s a hell of a lot more going on underneath it.
Go Deeper
The main article tells the story. These are the deeper dives into the individual pieces of the architecture:
- Why “I’m Easy Money” Is a Different Kind of Affirmation
- The Choke Point Method: Rewriting the Money Story
- The Cultural Zip File: Why Pop Culture Is a Carrier Wave
- Inside the Architecture of Easy Money
- Science, Mythology & Metaphysics: The Language of Possibility
- From Knowing to Embodying: The Gap Easy Money Was Written to Bridge
- What Is SubAtomic Hip Hop?