Pharoahe Monch tickets and 2024 tour dates

Biography

“Fuck you know about struggle?” Pharoahe Monch’s bold but rhetorical query opens the title track to his fourth collection of lyrical land mines, PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The line dares the listener to keep tumbling down the rabbit hole with the Queens, NY MC as he tackles familiar themes of gun violence, heartbreak and redemption but this time in the first person.

In 2011 the rapper and singer born Troy Donald Jameson unyoked himself from the confines of record industry contracts and declared his independence. The aural record of his resistance, W.A.R. (We Are Renegades) sits as a testament to the resilience of a wordsmith dedicated to his evolution despite the odds.

But his freedom came with a price.

"While W.A.R. was one of my best selling records and my first independent…I'm still spending for videos, marketing,” he explains of his tour of duty. Monch had released three albums as part of the group Organized Konfusion and two as a solo artist prior to W.A.R. "When you're independent you've got to get up in the morning, open that store, lift that gate. The traveling was exhausting. It left me drained.”

Monch has never made a secret of his battle with asthma and the lung disease literally came for this throat while recording one of “W.A.R.’s” standout songs, “Still Standing” featuring Jill Scott. But what some may not know is that, years before that incident his breaths almost stopped permanently.