Pharoahe Monch - "Desire"

Pharoahe Monch - Free (SRC 2007)

Pharoahe Monch - Desire / SRC

This is a frequent set-up for my opening paragraphs, but in a way it's self-fulfilling: Michael and I are only human. We have real lives, real problems, and occasionally we really live and solve them (This week, for example, Michael's finally taking time off to go home and rest a little). That said, it's tough giving proper devotion to this blog in a business that races relentlessly forward, through the days after days after weeks after are we at Web 3.0 yet? We're getting there. Patience.

And patience was something I'd run out of for sitting around waiting for good hip-hop albums to come out, so I actively went and looked for some this past week. I was so far out of the loop that I hadn't realized that we were even having a crisis in the genre right now; I thought that between the Detroit scene and everything coming out of Seattle we were doing okay. What did I know?

So I went digging. In the coming days we're going to have some stuff from Sixtoo, Educated Consumers and, inevitably, Madlib's third Beat Konducta record. In terms of delving into an artist that I wasn't already aware of, Pharoahe Monch's Desire was one that I had been lured into with the man's excellently understated cover-art (The other version is just as cool, which you may also have seen). I knew a little background: Troy Donald Jamerson, a Queens native with a history of Organized Konfusion and a penchant for the Egyptian. Had no idea about the Monchhichis, but I was aware of Internal Affairs. There was the whole sued-by-Godzilla thing. There was the wait that made Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury seem modest. There was Madden '02. Positive press for an album never hurts, but I wasn't about to waste time on a record that was set up as a guy's "decent" comeback. What did I know?

So I went listening. And let me say this: As an uneducated consumer, Pharoahe Monch won me over not just with production that speaks to the inner Dillas and Otis Jackson Juniors among us. But whereas the Beat Konducta series is all about crate-digging and searching for the perfect loops that lie within warped Bollywood vinyl from the 50s, Desire takes the origins of soul and funk and throws in distorted synths and futuristic ambient footwork to reach all corners of the hip-hop underground. A sonically astounding record, Desire is well worth the price of admission for the music alone.

Originally titled Innervisions, Desire is a personal album that unleashes all of Monch's anger on both the business and the pleasure side of things. Showtime, Mela Machinko, Mr. Porter, Tower of Power, Dwele, Tone, and Erykah Badu all lend vocal assistance, but this is clearly Monch's show. The gospel choir "Intro" brings you right into "Free," one of the best songs on the album. "While y'all stay strugglin' / We strugglin' MCs do the streets to be bubblin' on mix CDs." Fuck you, he defies us all. He's free. Evidence of this continues in the near-spirituals of songs like "Push" (which doubles as the first single) or even the bizarre "Bar Trap"; this emancipated feel is a running sound that Monch has acknowledged himself in interviews and in the people he's employed for production: The Alchemist, Denaun Porter and Black Milk are three of the most prominent.

The epic "Trilogy" has been derided as a poor man's "Trapped in the Closet," but I don't find it nearly as annoying. In fact, even without the UK bonus track "Agent Orange," it feels like "Trilogy" is a mellow way to go out, a proper ending to this cerebral album. There are distant gunshot sounds (really just drums, but the subconscious knows what's going on) and their clash with the laid-back R&B of the song itself provides an interesting backdrop for Monch to explain his whole wife-girlfriend(s) conflict. Needlessly sentimental or a well-placed downtempo slow-jam? I choose to go with the latter despite what's happening in the actual plot of the narrative. It's a good way to wrap things up in a neat n' tidy nine minutes. Relatively speaking.

I've made some runnings around to see how much the blogosphere cares about Pharoahe Monch. It seems like he's a lot less Clipse and a lot more Lupe Fiasco, good enough to namedrop but not quite fresh enough to be hyped to death. Food and liquor be damned: Desire has stamped its authority on this summer and while most kids are still bopping to the numerous remixes for "D.A.N.C.E." that must surely be out there by now, Pharoahe Monch has worked himself quietly back into the reckoning. What did I know before this album? About as much as you do now if you haven't already heard this. Get it.