Diddy/Pharoahe Monch: "The Future/Push"

It's 1997. Puff Daddy’s ode to his dead, rotund pal “I’ll Be Missing You,” is burning up the pop charts, prompting a trend over the next five years of teenagers asking why there’s a “weird, singing remix of that Puffy song” on their moms’ soft rock station in the minivan. It was a time of shiny suits and the beginning of the lowest common denominator “bling” era in rap, but Puffy’s lyrics weren’t necessarily bad, and even if they were, who would call him on it? This was some straightforward, heartfelt shit! About Biggie!

But then a few months passed and the kids got word that Puff Daddy did not, in fact, pen the lyrics to “I’ll Be Missing You” (sample: “Life ain’t always what it seems to be / Words can’t express what you mean to me”). Of the millions of people who purchased No Way Out (1997), apparently none bothered to read the liner notes. Regardless, it wasn’t until the Grammy’s, when “I’ll Be Missing You” won for best rap song, that astute viewers noticed a rapper named Sauce Money carrying a golden phonograph for writing the lyrics to the song. Which means that, yes, Puffy needed help writing lines like “Watching us, while we pray for you / Everyday we pray for you.” But, hey, the guy doesn’t write rhymes, he writes checks. And Sauce Money, an unknown outside of the rap world, drafted up some plain, inconspicuous words for the big man. And it worked out for P. Diddy, who ended up becoming a major farce in rap while Sauce would end up staring at his Grammy, deciding whether he should pawn it for some weed (probably). This is mildly depressing. Let’s fast forward to 2006. Ludacris speed ahead!

Hey, Diddy’s still here? Look, he invented the remix a few years ago! Thank goodness. Oh, he’s got a new song called “The Future”; how apropos. But one listen proves it’s definitely not Sauce Money this time. He must have written it himself, then! Puffy spits over a sinister, droning beat. His new multisyllablic cadence makes it seem like he should be tripping over his own words, but the strong, stuttering flow just keeps dribbling out of his mouth. The song itself isn’t catchy, but the rhymes are Puffy on his A-game, and he should be proud to be the author of such lyricism: “Mainline this new Diddy her-o-in / the Afro Amer-i-can / Dream is too ev-i-dent / the potential to be the first black pres-i-dent.”

On a totally unrelated note, Pharoahe Monch of Organized Konfusion is running out of rhymes. And he seems a lot richer, like he got paid a bunch for something, but he hasn’t had an album since Internal Affairs back in 1999. I wonder what he’s been doing in the meantime? One listen at his new song, “Push” and it seems like he wants to be a soul singer. Just because we didn’t mind your crooning on “The Light,” Monch, that doesn’t mean you need to go all Mos Def on us. He enlists the assistance of Tower of Power, who I assume helps Monch with the background singing and maybe provides the live instrumentals for the hard, horn-based production. The beat is head-nodding nice but repetitive, and the singing gets annoying, as Monch can’t really carry a tune. The stuttering doesn’t really work for you when you harmonize, dude. But it’s the end that reminds us that Monch can still rap. The unique, multisyllabic cadence of the 16 bars he laces makes us yearn for more of his fumbling-yet-calculated flow. “Make you notice me / Be like, “Damn dude’s on some to-tal-ly, / when he rides the bassline like Gin-o-bi-li” I’m / vo-cal-ly unmatched glo-bal-ly.” His album is due out soon, but if his long player is anything like this song, I’ll enjoy exactly half of it.

Just don’t let that Puffy money burn a hole in your pocket, OK?