Apropos of nada, we here at ShipsofHagoth are great lovers and supporters of the wonderful people of Minnesota! There is first and foremost the LDS Indie-band Low from Duluth, of course, whose discography we have cataloged repeatedly, excessively, and exhaustively. We have also published loving tributes to such Minneapolis-based alt-Rock legends as The Replacements (twice) and Hüsker Dü–not to mention other folk singers from Duluth like Trampled by Turtles and, you know, Nobel Prize-winner Bob Dylan. Famously, Eugene England was a branch president in Minnesota early during his academic career, upon which experience he wrote his most beloved essay “Why The Church Is As True As The Gospel.”
We have also noted in passing (in both a post and a book) how the late Russel M. Nelson was part of the research team at the University of Minnesota that pioneered the first cardiopulmonary bypass and heart-lung machine in 1951. (The first patient of Nelson’s research team, by the way, was a 6-year-old girl with a congenital heart defect. Reportedly, the heart-lung machine worked well for the first 40 minutes, but the heart defect was irreparable and the girl died on the operating table; that is, Minneapolis has long been a place of quite literal heart-break.)
Yet to date, the only piece we’ve published on Prince–the most widely popular Minnesotan of all–has been a brief Annotated Reading of “1999” we did to observe one New Years Day a couple calendars ago. Doubtless it has been only our own Punk & Indie snobbery that has prevented us from engaging with that musical superstar more often, and snobbery is pride, and pride is the universal sin, of which we must repent, “lest [w]e become as the Nephites of old” (D&C 38:39).
Besides, the Prince song that most meshes with this site’s M.O. isn’t the instantly (if still charmingly) dated party anthem “1999”, but rather 1991’s “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night,” a minor R&B hit he recorded with his then-new backing band The New Power Generation. At first blush, the track title appears to be fair endorsement of 1 Timothy 6:10–“For the love of money is the root of all evil”–not to mention Matthew 19:24’s “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”, the Sermon on the Mount’s “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?”, Acts 2:44-45’s “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need”, 4 Nephi 1:3’s “And they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift,” and of course Jacob 2:18’s “But before ye seek for riches, seek ye for the kingdom of God.” Money don’t matter indeed.
The actual lyrics of the track, however, swerve a little more subtly. It opens with a compulsive gambler breaking 22 in a game of Blackjack–“Unlucky for him again/He never had respect for money, it’s true/That’s why he never wins”–causing him to push his lady “away in a huff” with a frustrated cry of, “Money don’t matter tonight.” Far from endorsing a renouncement of riches for the Kingdom of Heaven, the song title in the first verse appears to just be the coping mechanism of a failed gambling addict. Really, we might say, he should’ve eschewed “even the appearance of evil” by avoiding casinos entirely (as we were all repeatedly taught as Youth), and instead saved and invested his money prudently and wisely.
Yet this latter sentiment, too, is explicitly denigrated by no less than the Savior Himself. In the Parable of the Foolish Rich Man (found only in Luke 12:16-21), Christ tells:
16 …The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully:
17 And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?
18 And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods.
19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
20 But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?
21 So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.
It is a very odd parable (and perhaps the fact that it only appears in Luke is why so many of us rationalize ignoring it), because the rich man here is otherwise following sound investment advice! Again, are we not all repeatedly counseled–by our own Church leaders, no less!–to save our money responsibly and invest it prudently, to avoid debt and thereby “release thyself from bondage,” to gather together our wealth both for retirement and a rainy day? Is not the Church entire doing just that with its absolutely massive hedge fund at present, after the financial embarrassments of the 1960s? Is that not exactly why so many of us lionize the wealthy and treat them as more righteous, virtuous, and wise than the bulk of humanity despite all available evidence? (Is that not overarching theme of George S. Clason’s The Richest Man in Babylon, a book we all love to recommend to each other, despite all our hymns about fleeing Babylon?) After all, were not the Nephites of old also blessed materially by the Lord whenever they were righteousness?
But then, we also tend to ignore what always seemed to happen to the Nephites immediately afterwords; not to mention how in the days leading up to their final and irrevocable self-destructions, the Nephites and the Jaredites alike found that their treasures had become “slippery.” Or, as Prince astutely declares in the chorus, “Just when you think you’ve got more than enough/That’s when it all up and flies away…”
The second verse of the song starts to hit a litter closer to home as well, as this same man whom Prince narrates to us is told “Look, here’s a cool investment”/They’re telling him he just can’t lose…” Anyone who has spent any sort of time in the Utah Valley (though it happens across the rest of Mormondom too) will report the sheer, irritating number of times they have been approached to join some sort of multi-level-marketing Pyramid scheme (many General Authorities are even former executives for NuSkin!), Summer Sales, and other assorted and sundry get-rich-quick schemes. Despite the fact that “Prosperity Gospel” has been explicitly denounced by President Oaks in General Conference before, it maintains its fiendish grip on the North American Saints, who find themselves unable to swerve free of its central logic which states: if the righteous “prosper in the land,” then is not a failure to prosper a denial of the good gifts of God?
Many of the Saints have fallen for these temptations before (including us, full disclosure); as does the character whom Prince describes in verse 2, who “goes off and tries to find a partner/But all he finds are users,” swiftly realizing that “All he finds are snakes in every color/Every nationality and size/Seems like the only thing that he can do/Is just roll his eyes”, and thereby realize for perhaps the first time, that its not just a coping mechanism, but maybe real wisdom, to confess that “Money don’t matter tonight/It sure didn’t matter yesterday”–and implicitly won’t matter tomorrow either, nor at any other point in the eternities. Hence why the chorus also preaches, “That’s when you find out that you’re better off/Making sure your soul’s alright”; as the Savior also taught simply, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” The Son of God’s endgame, after all, was not wealth and prosperity, but the cross.
It is in the third and final verse that Prince–that practicing, anti-war Jehova’s Witness–at last lets himself break out into a full-fledged sermon, stating simply and sarcastically, “maybe we can find a good reason/To send a child off to war.” The first Iraq War was waged that same year of 1991 (as alluded to early in the official music video), and U.S. invasions and bombings of OPEC nations have sadly remained evergreen concerns down to our present moment. Hence why Prince asks rhetorically, “So what if we’re controllin’ all the oil/Is it worth a child dying for?” Dead children are always the inexcusable collateral damage of even just wars—let alone wars over oil production—and the Christ has some very graphic things to say about millstones and the depths of the seas for those who should offend these little ones.
He really drives the point home with, “Anything is better than the picture of the child/In a cloud of gas/And you think you got it bad…” Satan in the Temple endowment announced his intention to “take the treasures of the earth, and with gold and silver buy up armies and navies, false priests who oppress, and tyrants who destroy and reign with blood and horror on this earth,” and all of human history and the evening news and whatever’s currently trending on social media can all collectively testify as to how literally and fully Satan’s threat came to pass.
The pursuit of wealth—of pride, the universal sin—is the final temptation. Brigham Young famously prophesied, while the Saints were still broke and ragged refugees to the Salt Lake Basin, that his greatest fear was that the Saints could face all persecution and never lose their faith, but watch them become rich and they will send themselves straight to hell–but we would be tempted by riches indeed, because the Latter-day Saints were destined to become the wealthiest people on the face of the earth–and whatever his other faults, one can’t help but acknowledge how fully Brother Brigham’s prophecy has come to pass as well. Collectively speaking, we do not behave as though “Money don’t matter tonight,” but rather that it matters constantly, consistently, yesterday, today, and forever more, that it just might be the only thing that does matter (it is perhaps why so many of us keep voting for wealthy men who lack any other redeeming qualities), in spite of all of the repeated declamations by all of the Prophets across all of the Bible and all of the Book of Mormon and from the mouth of the Savior Himself. “You can buy anything in this world with money” the Temple ceremony used to remind us, and far too many of us have taken the Evil One at his word, and happily played his game by his rules, rather than respond with the divine wisdom of “We have sufficient for our needs.” Our lips are near, but our hearts have often been far.
For it wasn’t just the urge to lay down a love-making R&B track that inspired Prince to pen “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” (at least not more than usual for him), but a sincere response to the overarching message of all Holy Scripture. I recall as missionaries how we often treated Jehova’s Witnesses like Prince as competition, a pale facsimile of the real thing, whose strictness and social-shunning-tactics make the BYUs look like Berkeley or Eugene by comparison; and maybe we were right to! Yet like the Samaritan of parable who was ultimately more righteous than all the Priests and Levites who passed down the road to Damascus, this particular Jehova’s Witness out of Minneapolis, Minnesota–a city and state currently and heroically resisting the abject abuse, viciousness, and cruelty of a very wealthy man–did indeed preach true doctrine when he recorded “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” in 1991, a smooth jam that, like the Gospel itself, has not once ceased to feel relevant to our times.