One afternoon in late -1970s Queens, New York, a boy comes home and sits down
to watch television. All week, the after-school slot has been showing
monster movies. “That day,” Pharoahe Monch recalls now, “they had this one
movie where all the monsters was in the shit together. And I was like,
‘Woah! Rodan and Gamera and Kong and Kong’s Son and Godzilla and Robot Kong
and all of them’, and I’m with my friends and we’re going crazy.” In 1999, a
sample from Godzilla formed the musical basis of hip hop artist Monch’s
biggest hit to date, Simon Says.
“So that would be one week”, Monch continues, “and the next week would be
Elvis Presley week, and my sister would be in front of the TV, watching this
Elvis shit, and there’s only one TV, and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want to do
homework; it’s raining outside. I’d rather watch TV than do nothing at all.’
So I’m inundated by all this Elvis stuff.” It was not wasted viewing. On
Monch’s latest single, Body Baby, he comes over all Presley, to a hip
rock’n’roll groove. The funny video for the song features the rapper trying
to win an Elvis contest. Like Simon Says, it’s not your usual hip-hop. Aficionados
of the genre will remember Monch (originally named Troy Jamerson) as the man
responsible for some of the most revered music in hip-hop in the 1990s, both
with Prince Po, as Organized Konfusion, and on his solo debut, Internal
Affairs.
If you’re wondering about the origin of his name, his MySpace page contains a
hilarious account of it. In essence, he saved up enough money one summer to
go to the barber without his father, and ended up with a tonsorial
catastrophe that reminded his schoolmates of the Monchhichis cartoon
monkeys. And the Pharoahe? Well, he was in a duo with Prince Po, so he “put
the Pharoahe prefix on to be more hip-hop”.
Monch is a well-built man in his mid-thirties, with expensive-looking casual
clothes, cornrow plaits and semi-tended facial hair, but no trace of bling.
(And if you doubt bling is still in town, look at the photos on R Kelly’s
recent CD.) He’s courteous, articulate and open-minded, with a palpable
sense of integrity, perhaps tempered by a hint of regret for what might have
been. Because Internal Affairs was released in 1999, and it has taken until
now for his follow-up album, Desire, to appear.
In many ways, the eight-year hiatus was beyond his control. He was signed to
the Rawkus label, which, against expectations, did not manage to sell enough
of his 1999 debut for it to go gold, and went under in 2004 (though the
label has been relaunched this year). It was partly out of disappointment
over his debut’s commercial underperformance that he went quiet for five
years. But, once free of Rawkus, and after “a good talking-to” from Talib
Kweli’s manager, he began hunting for a new home.
He was on the verge of signing with Eminem’s Shady label, but was stymied by
Geffen, owner of Shady and, before its collapse, of Rawkus. He also flirted
with P Diddy, and ended up writing two tracks on his Press Play album. “I
wanted to go to Miami and see what happens in his studio. Right away I was
like, ‘Wow, when you’re Sean Combs, the beats are different from what you
get when you’re Pharoahe Monch.' But for his own music, it didn't feel a
good fit: "I’m obviously not going to be on the radio going, ‘Pharoahe Monch
— bad boy for life!’” Finally, he signed to Steve Rifkind's SRC; in
Britain, in common with Common, he is on Island Records. His gig at the Jazz
Café, in London, last month was a roaring success. It sold out so quickly
that he is coming back to play the Scala on July 17.
Monch’s misadventures in the music industry have left a tang of bitterness,
coupled with determination. On the track Free, he likens record labels to a
plantation and figuratively describes MCs picking cotton in the fields.
Protest is a strong presence on Desire: the title is alluding more to
ambition, to “struggle and perseverance”, than to anything erotic. That
ambiguity is neatly expressed in a rap on the title track: “My book is the
ovary, the page I lust to turn/ My pen is the penis; when I write, the ink’s
the sperm.” The inverted sexual imagery — sex as a metaphor for something
else — is a characteristic piece of Pharoahe flair.
His language can be ripe, but Monch is too thoughtful a man to take such
terminology in vain. Which is why, when you hear him use the n-word in his
first line on the album, you know it is a statement. I ask Monch what he
makes of Russell Simmons’s latest cause, backed by Oprah: the hip-hop mogul
and founder of Def Jam declared recently that hip-hop should stop using the
words “nigger”, “bitch” and “ho”. Monch is unimpressed: “Here’s a dude who
profited 30 years off the n-word,” he says, “from LL Cool J to Public Enemy
to EPMD to Onyx to horrorcore, whatever would work — and now this. I think
the misconception is that hip-hop is at the forefront of the ignorance. It’s
not. I think the forefront of the ignorance is people getting inundated with
terrible songs that lower the standard of the art form. I don’t think Oprah
has the right to strip it from everybody just because someone makes a
not-so-great record that uses the word badly and unartistically.
“It’s about education. I think you should be banned from using the word if you
don’t have a proper education on where the word stems from, and the pain
that it caused my mother and father. I use it on my album in its original
form, how it was meant to be used, to offend people, because if I'm making a
reference about a record label feeling to me like a plantation, then that's
how I want to use the word; I want it to offend people, as the word offended
people when they used it back then.”
Monch’s model for the acceptability of such language may seem unworkably
idealistic, except that he is doing his part to provide that education. One
of many powerful songs on his album is his superb cover of Public Enemy’s
Welcome to the Terrordome. He says some of his younger friends were unaware
of the original, which made him realise that its words are still relevant.
Or there’s the spooky When the Gun Draws, for which he has made an
accompanying web film (www.gundraws.com)
that graphically demonstrates the pitfalls in America’s gun policy, a
subject on which he campaigns.
But there is nothing pi about Monch. He is self-deprecating and funny, and
well aware that humour can co-exist with, even reinforce, serious messages.
On his inspired remix of Amy Winehouse’s song Rehab, he is quite cruel about
the Nicole-Britney-Lindsay school of detox. “I was like, ‘F*** it. You might
as well just f*** up everybody in pop culture,’” he says. “Part of it is a
joke about how these artists play on that lifestyle and how the media play
on it. It’s a serious issue, but you can joke about it because of how much
the media cover it.”
Monch has a distinctive flow, or rapping style. It’s allusive, impressionistic
and, to use his favourite word, layered. Desire has a wide variety of styles
— or, as Monch puts it, “a bunch of shit that keeps me out of the box”. He
takes pride in his eclectic approach, such as the Godzilla and Elvis
influences. Many songs venture well into soul territory, with lots of brass
and backing vocals, in the manner of Gnarls Barkley or Outkast. The
production is rich, or punchy when it needs to be, and shows what can be
achieved in a hip-hop album without the names will.i.am, Pharrell/Neptunes
or Kanye on the cover.
As a sort of positive-thinking, complex, soulful riposte to the vicious
nihilism of much recent hip-hop, Desire is one of the year’s big noises. It
has not received an unenthusiastic — let alone an unfavourable — review.
Pharoahe Monch’s return could not be more timely. The question is, how has
hip-hop survived without him until now?
Pharoahe Monch plays the Scala, London NW1, on July 17. Desire is out now on
Island. www.pharoahe-monch.com
