You know, when Eminem released ‘Rap God’ last year, I wonder
how many people saw the underground rapper Pharoahe Monch referenced in the
lyrics and either thought, ‘Hey, I wonder who that is’, or ‘I’ve heard the
name, but if Eminem referenced him, he must be good, so it can’t hurt to check
him out’.
And I’m not too proud to admit that I include myself in the
second category. I had heard of Pharoahe Monch’s strange and twisted career
before – starting in the underground with the critically acclaimed duo Organized
Konfusion with Prince Poetry before releasing his debut instant classic Internal Affairs in 1999… and then
vanishing from rap music for a good eight years after a sampling controversy
before a comeback and complete shift in style and content with Desire in 2007. I figured that once
again, it was a good opportunity to finally acquaint myself with an artist in
my backlog that I just hadn’t had time to cover.
And man, it’s a good thing I did, because Pharoahe Monch
represents almost everything I love in rap music. A lot of personality and
charisma, a taste for eclectic beats and production, an actual sense of humour,
and most of all a gift for intelligent and layered wordplay that deserved all
of the praise it got. And with the
benefit of that knowledge, I could see traces of his multisyllabic flow and
delivery in so many rappers who followed him that it’s startling that he isn’t
more famous considering his influence.
But when Pharoahe Monch returned to hip-hop in 2007, he came
back with a decidedly different edge, less of the hard-spitting yet deftly
intelligent gangsta rap that characterized his debut and more of a conscious
political angle. Now in theory, I had no issues with this: of the many rappers
who have tackled politics and serious issues in their music, Pharoahe Monch
would probably be one of the few who delivered the material with any degree of
respectable nuance. But when he released his third album We Are Renegades in 2011, I found myself a little dissatisfied. The
political arguments were distinctly disjointed, the wordplay wasn’t quite as
tight, the heavier beats and production that moved away from the soul samples
often felt like they lacked cohesion, and it all spoke to a lack of singular
focus. Sure, the album was still very good and I liked much of the content that
he brought up, but I felt his presentation suffered a bit in bringing it to the
table. On top of that, the dystopian framing device of the album felt a little
silly and hyperbolic to me – not so much bad as lacking in subtlety.
As such, I wasn’t sure what we’d get with Pharoahe Monch’s
newest album Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder. The album did promise a more personal focus – a touch I felt was
somewhat missing from We Are Renegades,
but given it was marketed as a follow-up to that album, I had no idea what he
was planning to do. So I picked up the album and expected the worst – how did
it go?