Freedom’s Desire
“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 Jalylah 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.
We talk little about freedom these days; Fitting perhaps for something that might have only been tangible for those generations, who could only imagine walking off the very plantations—or into the voting booths—that fueled their spirits of resistance and desires for freedom in the first place. Freedom’s power was the way that it powered our imaginations—our desires for that “something else”—an open signifier for the comforts that we need to get from day-to-day. Freedom doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be Sean Bell or Kathryn Johnston; Freedom only dictates that you have faith in the processes that bring recourse and in that regard, perhaps we’ve never been free.
And this is where I give the rappers—some of them artists—credit. Too often those on the Left romanticize about the salt-of-the-earth Negroes, who encouraged the outrage against American apartheid, as if they remain unchanged since 1947. Rappers have been so much better at this. Here’s a game for you: Find the rapper that demands recourse from the State (“you mean ‘New Jersey’? as Tony Soprano queries daughter Meadow”)? Say what you will about the gleeful celebration of illicit economies—and I ain’t romanticizing about them MFers on their criminal grinds—but this is a do-for-self-generation. What James say, “open up the door, I get it myself.” Thus when, Monch gives love to his “blue collar workin', beer guzzlin', bootleg DVD sellin', keep hustling” peers (though he left out the strip club workers, that he obviously knows a little bit about) on “Push,” freedom resonates in a way that is more than tangible—it’s real.
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