Rawkus Records was sued for the Godzilla theme music sampled throughout “Simon Says” and, as a result, both the single and Internal Affairs were pulled from store shelves, but the song is easy enough to find. I always found it strange that Busta Rhymes directed the video, which, if I remember it correctly, sucked. A lot of critics have decried Monch's flow on this track, and I have to agree: the rapper that appears on here is not the same guy who appears elsewhere on Internal Affairs. This remains the only hit song that Pharoahe Monch will ever have in his solo career, and it still sounds good today, even if it's obvious that this track was recorded solely to attract attention to the project and not because this is the kind of song Monch likes to create. Even more pertinent today than it was back in 1999, even if Monch takes the metaphor a bit too far. Very interesting, and incredibly blunt in the opinion as to how today's artists are fucking up our chosen genre. Hearing it today, it seems that my initial impression was spot-on, as this song is simply boring. It's certainly titled like your average rap album intro, but since Pharoahe Monch actually rhymes on here, it gets a pass.Įven though Monch's beat is alright, I never paid any attention to this track when it was featured as the b-side to “Simon Says”. Which pisses me off, since that was one of the first CD singles I sold when I was struggling for a bit earlier in this decade. So, yeah, whoever still owns the single for "Simon Says" has a real collector's item on their hands. Pharoahe Monch hustled a solo deal out of Rawkus Records, made a few appearances on the label compilation Soundbombing II, and eventually released his debut, Internal Affairs, off of the strength of "Simon Says", a catchy not-at- all-like-what-you-would-expect-from-Pharoahe Monch club-ready track that utilized the aforementioned Godzilla sample, one which nobody at the label (apparently) bothered to clear, so even though a single was released and the song itself appeared in numerous films and television projects, including the first Charlie's Angels movie (also known as "the good one"), once the song hit the Japanese market, Monch's debut was pulled from store shelves and fucking erased, thereby rendering the two hundred thousand copies sold as the only discs ever created, limiting Monch's sales considerably. After three albums that failed to move enough units to justify any major record label giving them the time of day, the duo broke up, and even though they did not rule out the possibility of working together again, the group name was effectively retired. Kind of a sad trajectory, when you think about it.īorn Troy Jamerson, rapper Pharoahe Monch started off as one-half of critically acclaimed Organized Konfusion alongside Prince Po. In contrast, Pharoahe Monch's solo debut, Internal Affairs, was deleted from production less than a year after its release due to the illegal use of a Godzilla sample, one which was apparently so egregious that, even though everybody and their mother knows what the damn song sounds like, it caused the label to wash its hands of the project entirely. It helps that they hit store shelves within weeks of each other: Mos Def's Black On Both Sides, which saw the Billboard charts first, went on to move over half a million units and make a solo star out of rapper-slash-actor Dante Smith. In 1999, independent label extraordinaire Rawkus Records decided to market their two biggest releases of the year by promoting both of them at the same time.
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