Socialist credentials aside, RTJ4 is absolutely what you’d expect from a Run The Jewels album.
This commitment to wordplay as wisecracks birthed the characters Yankee and the Brave, an imagined buddy comedy action thriller (that may or may not actually come to fruition on the screen), and manifests on the bobbing, This also lends its name to the title track, “You see a future where Run the Jewels ain’t the shit/Cancel my Hitler-killing trip/Turn the time machine back around a century,” he raps on “the ground below.” It’s that kind of highly self-referential, bluntly political, fun-loving pulp fiction mash-up bar that keeps the project so viable.There are fewer back-and-forth exchanges than on previous albums and the verses don’t dovetail as much but the two still move well in tandem.
People are outraged, and rightly so, and George Floyd’s death has become a lightning rod for any and all racial tensions. They cover each other, their writing well-sequenced, their rapping finely staged. Run The Jewels 4 is somewhere near the top of that list. There’s a section on “never look back” where Mike punctuates every one of El-P’s thoughts. These are turbulent times. The current events made Run The Jewels decide to make their album available earlier.
Protests have erupted across the globe. Run The Jewels may deal with far more political subject matter than most of their peers, but they always do so with immaculate rhyme structures and one-liners, all delivered at breakneck speed. And when you do it on your own, it can be tough. But I needn’t tell you that.
Questions are being asked, people are finally sitting up and paying attention, and amidst all of this, I’m reminded of another seminal, politically charged album, and another wave of protests, almost exactly 5 years ago. The same classic hip-hop flows, caustic beats and dark humour are all present and correct here. It was such a blessing to me to be able to have my friends share the obsession and a little bit of the responsibility for caring that this music gets done. VIDEO PREMIERE! El-P rebooted his Instagram yesterday, and the very first post announces that he and Killer Mike are working on new music that will see the light of day next year. I think basically we’re going to go back to two dudes on mushrooms talking about how much better we are. “Run the Jewels has always been an homage to a degree, to a feeling that we had, to the classic groups that we came up with,” El-P explained earlier this year. Even when serious, it never runs the risk of becoming dour or unbearable, because they feel like they’ll always get the last laugh. He is in a near-constant state of agitation, appearing through plumes of weed smoke to kick up dust, like some whistleblowing anti-hero in a dystopian YA novel. UPDATE 06.03.20: The world needs this right now. Stream RTJ4 below, and download it here.
The lyric is about RTJ are still taking it to the streets to fight a tyrannical ruling class and racist policing.
We can’t wait. Run The Jewels – RTJ4 – Statement . Required fields are marked * Your email address will not be published. A vague thematic thread runs through the record, of El-P and Killer Mike as a fictional TV show duo, Yankee and The Brave, a reference to the respective baseball teams they support.
But after the taxing process of making El-P, for his part, has rarely sounded so animated. Protests spring from pain but not a universal pain. Anyone with a phone, anyone who turns on the news, anyone who even talks to somebody else knows it to be true. I feel like it was on Run The Jewels one. Rap super-duo Run The Jewels premiere “Legend Has It”, the first video from their universally lauded album Run The Jewels 3. On their fourth installment, Killer Mike and El-P are back to tune up the ruling class and the racist police state, this time streamlining the process and settling into their most natural rhythm.“You so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper—‘I can’t breathe’/And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV,” Killer Mike raps on “walking in the snow,” his voice urgent. Mike’s bluster can cover El’s evasiveness, and El’s tendency to hang back and observe bolsters Mike’s aggression. And the Run The Jewels thing really was the set off of that and it became this family thing. The magic of their music is that you feel like a part of something bigger than yourself, like you can overcome your own cowardice or at least admit to its existence deep within. The rage and sorrow about the divide between black and white and the superiority some whites feel they’re entitled to, is impressively articulated on the latest offering by Run The Jewels, the rap-duo mad up by rapper/producer El-P and rapper Killer Mike.
In one exchange, El strings out a sentence like a line of train cars, “You covet disruption, I got you covered, I’m bustin’/My brother’s a runner, he’s crushin’, it’s no discussion,” crafty in and around the corners, to which Mike adds, frankly: “People, we the pirates, the pride of this great republic/No matter what you order, muhfucka, we’re what you’re stuck with.”The banter holds RTJ’s music together at the seams. And it was a big part of Run The Jewels being fun.