Appearing on his massive (in every sense of the word) 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly and cited as a favorite track by no less than President Obama, Kendrick Lamar’s “What a Dollar Cost” is a modern Hip-Hop retelling of Matthew 25:34-46 and Luke 16:19-31. Here, the rapper places himself in the position of the rich man cast down into eternal torments due to his callous neglect of the beggar Lazarus, while the beggar is revealed in the end to be God himself, for “Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”
The scene is set with the narrator pulling up his “luxury car” into “a gas station,” when he is accosted by “A homeless man with a semi-tan [Middle-eastern?] complexion,” begging him for money. The narrator in turn tells the homeless man off, insisting that it was really “A piece of crack that he wanted, I knew he was smokin’.” The panhandler continues to “beg and plead” for him to feed him, but the narrator “didn’t believe it, told him to beat it,” that he had no interest in “Contributin’ money just for his pipe,” to which the transient responds cryptically, “My son, temptation is one thing that I’ve defeated.” At this point, anyone who’s attended Sunday School growing up knows exactly who the big reveal is going to be in the end, and the only question is how the narrator will acquit himself before Him who overcame the temptations of the Evil One in the desert.
The homeless man then demands of the speaker, “Listen to me, I want a single bill from you/Nothin’ less, nothin’ more,” but our narrator instead hops in his car and “closes the door.” This isn’t the end of the interaction, however; they get to staring intensely at each other through the car windows, which soon has the narrator “Guilt trippin’ and feelin’ resentment.” But rather than acknowledge the source of his guilt, repent of his meanness of spirit and give him the dollar, the narrator instead begins to go through the complex process of rationalizing his resentment of the poor–and more importantly, he does so in the exact same way all of us do when accosted by a panhandler: “why he was mad at a stranger like I was supposed to save him/Like I’m the reason he’s homeless and askin’ me for a favor,” he says to himself, going so far as to state self-righteously, “I never understood someone beggin’ for goods/Askin’ for handouts, takin’ it if they could,” and even calls the homeless man a drunk to his face: “I smell grandpa’s old medicine/Reekin’ from your skin, moonshine and gin.” He seeks to blame the man for his own poverty and misery, in order to justify not giving him that single, measly dollar.
This moment in the song should be of especial interest to those of us essaying to be Latter-day Saints, because it is also deeply reminiscent of perhaps the most strenuously ignored and downplayed passage in the entire Book of Mormon (seriously, I’ve sat through, just, soooo many Sunday School lessons that have either straight-up skipped or re-interpreted into meaninglessness this section entirely), namely, Mosiah 4:16-19:
16 …and ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish.
17 Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just—
18 But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God.
19 For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God…
Without even intending to, the narrator in “What a Dollar Cost” has re-enacted this same exact exchange from the Book of Mormon: he has suffered the beggar to put up “his petition in vain;” he has justified his withholding by arguing that “The man has brought upon himself his misery;” he argues that “his punishments are just,” and so withholds the dollar.
Even worse, the narrator goes so far as to declare his own selfishness a virtue, a symbol of his hard-work ethic, thriftiness, and prudent savings: “My selfishness is what got me here, who the f*** I’m kiddin’?/So I’ma tell you like I told the last bum, crumbs and pennies/I need all of mines.” This is the “greed is good” philosophy of Wall Street‘s Gordon Gecko, mid-period Nietzsche, late-period Ayn Rand, and modern-day Silicon Valley. Notably, this is also the exact same argument that Korihor the Anti-Christ uses in Alma 30:17: “every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime.”
After this argument from a literal Anti-Christ, the response from the panhandler comes swift and terrible; revealing His true self, He declares: “Know the truth, it’ll set you free/You’re lookin’ at the Messiah, the son of Jehovah, the higher power/The choir that spoke the word, the Holy Spirit, the nerve/Of Nazareth, and I’ll tell you just how much a dollar cost/The price of having a spot in Heaven, embrace your loss, I am God.” The judgment is harsh, but still just; as King Benjamin warned in Mosiah 4:18, whosoever treats a beggar this way “perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God,” except they repent. As King Benjamin also famously declared in that same sermon, “When ye are in the service of your fellow being, ye are only in the service of your God”–with the obvious corollary that if we are not in the service of our fellow being, then we have no place with our God at all.
Now, there is of course zero evidence that Kendrick Lamar enjoys any sort of association with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; nevertheless, “the Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the world” (D&C 84:46), and it is clear that both Lamar (who’s 2013 breakthru album good kid, m.A.A.d city is structured around a Sunday prayer meeting) and the Book of Mormon are animated by that same Holy Spirit that encourages generosity above all else. For that matter, so are the rest of us–as Joseph Smith said in the King Follett discourse, we all have the most accurate Bible of all, in our hearts–and hence we will be likewise condemned if we act with similar meanness of spirit.
As for the music itself: The backing-track is of an old, bluesy piano piece. In fact, on some of the sillier corners of the internet, you can find comment-boards where folks sincerely assume “What a Dollar Cost” is sampling Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song,” the stand-out track from their 2001 album Amnesiac.
Although Radiohead does indeed use a piano with similar chord progressions on “Pyramid Song,” it is still clearly not the source for “What a Dollar Cost,” for the simple reason that “Pyramid Song” does not swing. And in response to the obvious counter: yes, Radiohead, a bunch of scrawny, neurotic Englishmen though they may have been, knew how to swing when they felt like it; anyone who’s listened to the bass-and-guitar line on “The Tourist” knows that. For that matter, Amnesiac‘s final track is a straight-up Dixieland number called “Living in a Glass House“–if Radiohead had intended “Pyramid Song” to swing, they could’ve done so on the exact same album. The likelier explanation for the two tracks’ resemblances is simply that both Radiohead and Kendrick Lamar drew inspiration from a similar well of old Jazz influences (just as we are all influenced by the same Holy Spirit), not that one influenced or sampled the other.
But Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” is of interest here beyond the superficial similarities to “What a Dollar Cost,” for it is the rare Radiohead track with a sense of real peace, even some semblance of hope about it. Peace and hope are rarely part of Radiohead’s M.O.; they have made an entire career out of songs about paranoia, fear, anxiety, anger, depression, self-loathing, and panic. “Pyramid Song” is not just an outlier in its use of piano, but in overall tone and feel.
Once you’ve parsed Thom Yorke’s nasally falsetto, the lyrics appear to narrate a dream (like Lehi, “I have dreamed a dream”), or maybe an out-of-body astral experience, or perhaps even a vision of death itself. The narrator describes jumping into a river and seeing “Black-eyed” yet kindly angels, “A moon full of stars and astral cars” filled with former lovers, and visions of all pasts and futures, where “we all went to heaven in a little row boat.”
You can certainly still perform a pessimistic reading of the song if you desire–reading the lyrics as a sort of sad little wish-fulfillment that only in turn underscores how lonely and frustrated our actual reality is or whatever, or even (more distressingly) reading it as a peon to suicide, which I’ve also seen on an alarming number of forums–save that in most Radiohead lyrics, you don’t need to perform a pessimistic reading at all, since the depressing lyrics are all quite obvious and overt. (Even when they were experimenting with complex poly-rhythms and/or atmospheric electronica, lyrically they never really progressed beyond straightforward fair like “I’m a creep/I’m a weirdo…”) The fact that the pessimistic one isn’t the only possible reading on “Pyramid Song”–that there’s at least a space available for a more hopeful reading of the lyrics–is itself a real change in pace from the vast majority of their oeuvre.
I myself lean towards the more hope-filled reading as the most logical one, because the song finishes with the mantra of “There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt.” No fear of course means that there is perfect love, for “perfect love casteth out all fear” (1 John 4:18; Moroni 8:16). It is something we all need to be reminded of on those Sunday mornings when we awaken depressed and moody. It is also the same perfect love we all must lay a-hold of if we are to avoid the meanness of spirit that “What a Dollar Cost” warns against.