Not all young, business minded, Black men wear suits and sip Cristal.

After paying a reported six figure ransom to gain their freedom from Massa Disney, the two lyrical masterminds hailing from Queens who call themselves Organized Konfusion -- twenty six year old Prince Poetry and Pharaoh Monche (who gave his age as "25, 26, 27") -- have returned to the limelight with a new album, a new record label, a new performance philosophy and a lean, new attitude. Further developing their ethic of stylistic and content-based concepts, they present their Priority debut with a mind for reclaiming the basics of hip hop and telling their slanted urban tales with the eye of a movie director and the mind of a CEO.

Debuting in 1991 with one of that year's catchiest singles, "Fudge Pudge" off their self-titled groundbreaking freshman album, the group languished on Disney imprint Hollywood/Basic without proper promotion or support. The anger and frustration that this situation manifested itself in the fire and fury of Stress: The Extinction Agenda. Like the group's everpresent logo --- a technodreadlocked Black man clawing his way from an opaque pit -- the group as well has slowly worked its way out of the muck towards artistic and economic freedom.

"Equinox," said Monche (who lost weight and started shaping up after a hospitalized bout of asthma) with great solemnity of the new album's title, "the dictionary term is the time, twice a year, when the sun crosses the equator and it makes night and day equal on the planet. It's like a middle ground. How we correlate that into the album is, it's the main character, who also narrates his own story, in a time elapsed kind of thing. Just going through trials and tribulations of life. He's faced with negative obstacles and positive things, and he has to make choices. It's that blunt, and that simple. The wrong, the right, and the middle ground. People who dabble a little bit. There's reasons why people do what they do."

"We've always been visual," the more animated Poetry continued, "because we both are artists. Monche was like illustration and computer graphics, I was like advertising and computer graphics. We always had a visual perspective when looking at things. A lot of times, being different with lyrics, we was always like, 'you can see it like this, right?' We always tried to have a strong beginning, a strong ending, get people to meet in the middle. People say 'Organized Konfusion is really different,' we're not really different. We use the same pattern that everybody that creates, whether it's a person who writes poetry, a person who writes books, movies ... you see a picture, and you want people to be able to see it from their own perspective. It gives people the variations to use their minds without seeming like you preachin' to them."

With great handling from their new label and greater heights yet to reach, Organized Konfusion seem poised to claim the benefits of the props they have long been given by underground hip hop heads from Puyallup to Pensacola and beyond. They have a thorough plan set out, with shows that will feature dancing, turntable mastery by DJs and possibly even graffiti, as well as the excellent showmanship they've always been known for. And they're still able to have fun -- through "dead mics and wack promoted shows" and "what my funny label releases" -- as two best friends who are honest with each other and circumspect about the world of pain called the rap game that their creativity has brought them into, over, and ultimately through.