Are You Looking for a Man in Finance?
16th July 2024
“Did I just write the song of the summer?” twenty-seven-year-old Megan Boni, an aspiring New York-based singer-actress known on social media as “Girl on Couch,” asked her public a few weeks ago. Days before, she suggested that her TikTok followers set to music a thirteen-word satirical musing she had improvised about her undersexed Gen Z peeresses’ lofty romantic expectations. Known simply as “Man in Finance,” the song’s lyrics easily divide into four short verses that unfold like shallow ads in the “Personals” section of an old newspaper: “I’m looking for a man in finance/Trust fund/Six-five/Blue eyes.”
Adaptations have gone viral on social media, gathering more than 80 million hits and earning Boni more than $300,000 in revenue. She has reportedly landed brand promotion deals, received a contract offer from Universal Music and quit her 9-5 corporate sales job. Variations of the song are thumping in DJ sets all over the world. Mainstream electronic music superstar David Guetta remixed it to the 2010 anthem “Like a G-6” in a recording with more than16 million plays on Spotify alone. Parody videos have already appeared, using the basic beat to list purported characteristics of traditionally minded wives (“Trad wife/Sourdough/Eats meat/Wants kids”), less appealing New York romantic prospects (“Freelance/Five-six/Tattoos/Bushwick”) and other types who fall outside the desired milieu.
At first hearing, the song comes across as a toxic artefact of a debased society and a misandrist objectification of men. Boni delivers the lyrics in the slack-jawed vocal fry of a narcissistic female who is obviously only interested in men with lucrative careers, independent resources and two superficial physical characteristics. All other traits are unspecified and presumably unimportant. She sounds like the type of woman wise parents warn their sons to avoid, giving off a Meghan Markle-ish “ick” and willing to trade whatever she imagines love is for otherwise unobtainable financial security provided by a reasonably good-looking man.