Freedom’s Desire
by Mark Anthony Neal

“I’m someone who will get heated about politics” rapper Pharoahe Monch tells Time Out New York’s Jesse Serwer, adding that “then the next minute , I just want to lay back with a glass of Hennessy and suck on some big ol’ titties.” To which critic Jaylah Burrell astutely observes that Monch “exhibits a Black square male anxiety that undermines the cool pose he’s trying so hard to assume.” A squareness that, she argues, “circumscribes all Black males who aren’t thugging and or/pimping.” Monch has likely been taking notes from Common—and both no doubt remember the challenges Big Daddy Kane faced nearly 20-years ago trying to channel his inner Al Green in a world for which most would have preferred Malcolm X. And it’s not that we haven’t desired our AfroBoHo icons (damn near all nerds in reality) in sexual terms—I’m thinking of the Stephen Shames photo of a bare-chested Huey Newton holding a copy of a Bob Dylan album (which incidentally graces the cover of Robert Reid-Pharr’s new book Once You Go Black) and have you seen Zadie Smith lately for that matter—but we are disturbed when our heroes speak back to our desires. We forget, perhaps, that our heroes often desire the very freedom(s) that we have emboldened them to purchase on our behalf—freedom(s) amorphous, personal and yes, carnal.

Desires for freedom or better yet freedom’s desire is palpable throughout Pharoahe Monch’s new recording. Desire opens with a rendition of the Negro spiritual “Oh Freedom” which segues into the Monch original “Free.” In the hands of another artist this might be an all-too-obvious nod to yet another drama about a rank-and-file rapper locked into a label deal that they didn’t like; Of course it’s about the paper—like our icons shouldn’t want to be fairly compensated for their talents (“Your A&Rs the house, the label’s the plantation/Now switch that advance for your emancipation/MCs in the field, like pick cotton for real”)—but, Monch offers a more generous view.

"Oh Freedom” is a obvious reference to Black America’s “greatest generation”—Nina Simone could have been shot for writing and singing “Mississippi Goddamn”—while the lyrics to “Free” are legitimately obsessed with clarifying the means of production of the very thing Monch desires your consumption of. But when Monch employs some of the on-the-ground rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement in “Free’s” chorus (“you can spit in my face/hold me down/I’ll keep my feet firm to the ground/Because I’m free”) the point is powerfully made that freedom has always been a thing of perspective; I believe I be, therefore I be.

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