Pharoahe Monch
Desire
The spirit of the times once again seems to be critical adoration for tales of unbridled masculine ambition and force. On the Oscars front (surely the best measure of the critical zeitgeist ever – who didn’t love Crash?), we’ve gone from tales of people getting by (Brokeback Mountain, Closer) and tales of ambition leaving the protagonist ruined and batshit crazy (The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby) in the past few years to fuckin’ badass vs. fuckin’ badass for the right to say, ‘YOU WILL NOT BEAT ME! YOU WON’T!’ (The Departed, There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men). It should not surprise our general readership which camp gets the Factual offices here more excited. Elsewhere, Obama is getting people good and riled up with promises of conquering Washington (vs. the 2004 campaign - I was admittedly not living in the US, but do you remember anything about the candidates trying to rise above each other? I only recall them making vague allusions to loving America a lot), the Patriots are trying to make everyone in their path look bad for that whole catching them cheating thing, and Jack Bauer is… well, we’ve got The Wire, anyways, and that’s full of this kind of stuff. And in the best of 2007 list, we have the Pharoahe Monch comeback album declaring that nothing will hold back his ambition. We believe him, and we are eating this shit up.
This is how I wanted my East Coast hip-hop to grow up. The tracks are rooted in the kind of groove that I’d be proud to have coming out of a car window – heavy on the horns punctuated with the occasional overdriven guitar, pre-Bee Gees era disco soul loving the thematic buzz words (Desire! Pushing! Freedom!). The MC touches all of the developmental bases, giving us a bit of Chuck D’s pulpit, Nas’ flow, Ghostface’s vision for the slant rhyme, and the Clipse’s “God I wanna be you guys!” swagger. And then there’s the struggle. This guy’s statements of determination make me want to take on a prison riot by myself. Oh, and then there’s a psychoanalytic theory gem or two in there just to let you know that mold isn’t broken, it’s just freshly recast: “My book is an ovary / The pages I lust to turn / My pen's the penis / When I write the ink's the sperm.” The couplet let’s you know that Monch’s music isn’t evolution, but it is aware of its linear maturation. Like I said, this is how I wanted my East Coast hip-hop to grow up.
-Josh Woodbeck, 2008
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