Album Review: Desire by Pharoahe Monch

What if Kool G Rap's second album came out approximately eight years after his first? That would be a period long enough to leap from Road to the Riches to Roots of Evil, over Wanted: Dead or Alive, Live and Let Die, and 4, 5, 6. While it's an unfair analogy to make -- for many reasons -- when talking about the frustrating lag between Internal Affairs and Desire, it's a helpful one to think about if you're approaching Desire with the expectation of hearing Internal Affairs, Vol. 2.

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Pharoahe Monch would be one of hip hop’s most respectable, most enduring working titans… providing he ever actually released anything. If I gave you the whole backstory, we’d have to skip lunch. Open a new window, Google him (check the spelling) and pick me up at the next ‘graph. Meanwhile, suffice it to say that his former group Organized Konfusion predates the handheld calculator, his never-released 2002 LP Inner Vision remains one of rap’s ghost classics, and that Desire, its would-be follow-up, is the first thing he’s dropped in well nigh a decade, which is at least a century in rap years.

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