Rape (song)

Last updated
"Rape"
Song by Pharoahe Monch
from the album Internal Affairs
ReleasedOctober 19, 1999
Recorded1999
Genre East Coast hip hop
Length2:37
Label Rawkus Records
Songwriter(s) Pharoahe Monch
Producer(s) Pharoahe Monch

"Rape" is the fourth track on Internal Affairs , the debut album of Queens rapper Pharoahe Monch. Allmusic critic Steve Huey says in his review "Monch lives up to his reputation as one of hip-hop's most technically skilled MCs. Nowhere is this balancing act more evident than on "Rape," a rather disquieting extended metaphor for his mastery of hip-hop (other MCs just "ain't fuckin' it right")." [1]

Primarily, the song is a satirical response to rapper Common's classic "I Used to Love H.E.R.," a nostalgic song that features a feminized personification of hip-hop as a lost love that has fallen to vice. Pharoahe Monch's more graphic and violent rendition is accordingly a critique of the vapid state of contemporary mainstream hip-hop, conveyed from the perspective of a variously passionate or obsessed rapist, equally infatuated by hip-hop as a woman. As Huey points out, "Rape" equally is an extended metaphor for Pharoahe's technical mastery of hip-hop.

I'm obsessed with multiple nude photographs of the beat in my room on the wall

Pondering the verses, fondling my balls
Witness a nigga who will take rap and chase it
Through unoccupied dimly lit staircases and rape it
Grab the drums by the waistline
I snatch the kick, kick the snares and sodomize the bassline

Pharoahe Monch, "Rape"

Personification and extended metaphor are techniques widely employed by hip-hop lyricists. In fact this very song is developed from a theme that is found in a Pharoahe Monch verse five years earlier. "Thirteen", a song from the 1994 Organized Konfusion album Stress: The Extinction Agenda, contains the following excerpt from Pharoahe's verse:

Pharoahe, I'm no slave to a rhythm I whip it

Then I take its name and change its religion
Then I chop the foot off the fuckin beat
For trying to escape the track, now its obsolete
That's just the state of mind that I'm in when i... [2]

Pharoahe Monch, "Thirteen"

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References

  1. Huey, Steve. "Internal Affairs at AllMusic.com" . Retrieved February 4, 2009.
  2. "Thirteen Lyrics". Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved February 4, 2009.