Run The Jewels 2 Wanted To Jump Start A Revolt Against Institutional Corruption. Why Didn't It?
THE UNMITIGATED FURY OF KILLER MIKE AND EL-P’S RAP OPUS GROWS MORE RELEVANT WITH EACH YEAR
Tristan Young @talltristan
All art is political. There is some persistent debate around this notion, but there really shouldn’t be. Even the storm troopers in Star Wars were obvious stand-ins for the Nazi scourge. That the recent Last Jedi has sparked such vitriol along the fault lines of social responsibility and representation really should put the debate to rest. Yet even if hairs are to be split along the interpretations of more benign forms of entertainment, there is no shying away from the challenges presented in Run The Jewels 2. This is not escapism; this is not a means of release from the hell scape that is modern life. This is a journey through the worst of it. One where accusations are directed with unflinching temerity towards everything from the foundational pillars of society to us, the listeners. It is packaged within gregarious and ultra slick production, ensconced in the convergent trends of stadium hip hop, rave culture, and underground EDM to render it somehow more palpable and jarring at the same time. However, despite its raucous and hyperbolic presentation, it is ultimately a sobering condemnation. If we are to understand the project, let alone enjoy its myriad merits, we must strive to reconcile, if not our role in at all, at least our place in it.
The second of a series under the same project banner, RTJ2 was released by hip hop veterans Killer Mike and El-P in 2014. Their first mixtape under the name RTJ garnered a reasonable amount of critical praise, but still seemed a bit primordial. In RTJ2 however, the appeal of their confluence of confident swagger and socially conscious disdain became irresistible to the masses. Killer Mike and El-P were on a tear, and nothing was going to stop them. The target of their opprobrium ranges from religious indoctrination, economic inequality, and a horrifying heritage of police brutality. In the year 2019 such discourse- amidst the dangerously partisan and mollifying level of corruption from the Trump administration- seems cynically routine. In 2014, it was a disorienting wake up call. Consider, the most recent land mark hip hop albums that proceeded it were Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid Maad City, the intimate story of a lost soul finding the wrong ways in life in Compton, and Yeezus, a deranged albeit really fun victory lap succeeding an autobiographical fantasy. The idea of a hip hop project directing its efforts so far outward towards the upper echelons of power hadn’t been in vogue since the mid 90s, and never to such potent extremism.
That visceral imagery and tonality is present right from the get go. Never mind that in Blockbuster Night Part 2 Killer Mike raps, “top of the morning, my fist to your face is fucking Folgers”, that pugilistic intent is endowed before the first track even properly begins. “I’m gonna bang this the bitch the fuck out” he screams in an un-mastered, seemingly off mike soliloquy. As jarring as that abrasive intro is, the more telling line happens later on with El-P ominously warning, “maybe you should be careful be before flipping a stranger’s switch, and assuming the war is won isn’t a symptom of arrogance”, amidst a sobering a dizzying sample by East of Eden, a gnarled tangle of squeamish guitars and string instruments that would make Mike Oldfield blush. These two are dangerous and yes, they are at war; possibly with you.
This is not to say that RTJ2 is a bleak or dispiriting affair- nothing could be further form the truth. RTJ2 is rife with blaring sirens, clipping and epileptic vocal samples, and sleazy bass lines that exude seduction and mass appeal. Much of their melodic framework, architected by Track Star DJ in part, interprets the excesses of EDM and crass electronica, distils in into something more spartan and relegates it to a supporting roll, exercising it of its obnoxious overbearance. The war drum speed base mixed with Zack De Le Rocha’s (yes, he’s in this) looping vocal sequence in Close Your Eyes And Count To Fuck are thrilling. The psychedelic death spiral of synths that permeate the more dire moments of Early drip with trance and stimulation. The apoplectic mixture of bone rattling percussion and emergency broadcast drones in the sensational Angel Duster not only perfectly encapsulate its call to arms rhetoric, but triggers an almost primal, atavistic response. RTJ2 will challenge you sonically just as much as rhetorically.
Beyond a more elaborate take on stadium sized soundscapes, the production chops of RTJ2- which are considerable- also revel in subtler details. The low key murderous pulse of Blockbuster Night Part 2 wears its Jaws theme influences comfortably on its sleeve. Killer Mike and El-P are just as dangerous as the damn shark ever was, and they can travel across land. The surreal lullaby keyboards in Early, ratcheted up to an anxious pace, convey a sense of familial intimacy and comfort, one that will be put at considerable risk as the song’s subject matter develops. The impending sense of doom, slithering across the audible medium like a serpentine predator in Jeopardy is a fucking experience. RTJ2’s bombast is matched by an intellectual rigor that translates surprising well into its less overt stylistic approaches.
A healthy dose of levity also renders the urgent subject matter somewhat more approachable. These two can be rather funny. The only thing that makes a line like “you can all run naked backwards through a field of dicks”, as sung by EL-P in Oh My Darling Don’t Cry more ridiculous is just how well it lands. There’s also some insane hype lines like, “See, your favourite rapper aint shit, and me, I might be”, by Killer Mike in Jeopardy, or, “I’m about twice as hot as about half of hell”, by EL-P in Angel Duster. The tongue and cheek humour is matched by an, admittedly superfluous, ambition in the sense that they rereleased this entire album with noting but cat sounds and called it Meow The Jewels. None of this is made up.
It can’t all be hype lines and references to how the Mets suck; El-P and Killer Mike dive head first into some traumatic material. Their distinctive approaches paint a broad picture and understanding of the world at large and the institutional rot it is infected with. Killer Mike conducts himself as an evangelical- perhaps heretical- preacher, boasting his moral outrage from the roof tops for all to hear. EL-P, in contrast, is more of a Rorschach style character, deeply cynical by nature with an inexorable talent for sniffing out and targeting the worst of humanity. They render their thesis through severe one liners and sobering long form anecdotes. Killer Mike will spit out various fuck the police style lines but also question at length the utility in living in a community when the leaders of said community exploit you from behind a veil of bureaucratic obfuscation. El-P has a quick but fierce line, “I don’t give a fuck about power, I’ll pluck the eye out of the pyramid”, in Angel Duster, and in Crown tells the story of a young man, motivated by nothing other than pure unabashed patriotism, who joins the armed service only to become the victim of indoctrination. In perhaps the most Orwellian line of the album he proselytizes, “You are not you, you are now us, we are the only ones you can trust”.
The two punch high and low. They will attack the sexual depravity of the church- “members of clergy that rule on you through religion, so strip your kids to the nude and tell them that god will forgive them”, to the depravity of the individual- “You drive a rape van, mullet ray bans”. They may have their grievances with nearly all institutions, but they don’t want you to think you are fully of the hook. That sense of discomfort is paramount to RTJ2’s effectiveness.
The lyrics are uncomfortable; objectionable even at times if one so chose to interpret them that way. A person is certainly well within their rights to take issue, even express outrage at Killer Mike’s incantations in Close Your Eyes And Count To Fuck, “now get the pillow torchin’, where the fuck the warden? And we find him we don’t kill him we just water board him”. However before one takes umbrage at directing such violent fury at an avatar for systemic oppression, consider the larger context of the album and the experience of the minority groups in America. Later on in Early, perhaps RTJ2’s most resonant passage occurs, “I apologize if I got out of line sir because I respect the badge and the gun, and pray today aint the day where you take me away in front of my beautiful son”. The various under represented communities have understood the rules of societal obedience for generations, and that even if they abide by them, brutal and devastating interactions with systemic racism and law enforcement are still arbitrarily common- so what’s the point? They have played by the rules and they still end up in jail. How can one expect this disparity to not receive ferocious push back? As El-P intones, the government will relentlessly record our movements via omnipresent surveillance as we walk into a convenience store, but we can’t expect a body cam to be turned on when a cop murders an unarmed person? Again, why are we surprised that people want to burn this system down? Why does their rhetoric and not the societal imbalances that warrant it raise our red flags? None of this is ok; none of us need to be told this, but we often need to be reminded in the bluntest and harshest of terms. If that yields an unnerving level of discomfort, then we’re getting somewhere.
Run The Jewels has become a rallying cry for social change and upheaval in the intervening years since RTJ2. A vicious bulwark against the moderate notions of mere incremental change, RTJ2 demanded a revolution. An anxious and insolent fury throughout the album intimates they probably realize they alone couldn’t instigate one, but to a world under siege by sexual assaulters, crooked cops, perverted preachers and lying politicians- they wanted them to know they too were being watched.
It’s the lying politicians that should especially feel the heat, as the rhetoric of RTJ2 is comprised exactly of what they can only say they are made of. While it has been a main stay of political discourse at least since the New Deal reshaped everything- and then New Gingrich broke it all- the pervasive and odious utterances of being the ‘straight shooter’, the ‘real talker’, the ‘one who tells it like it is’ have grown only more obnoxiously egregious in the Trump era. The President who is just telling it like its, giving us straight talk, has burdened his surrogates and sycophants with three straight years of having to clean up his verbal diarrhoea. Explaining away his outbursts; explaining the explanations. “He didn’t mean it that way”, “you’re misunderstanding what he said”, “You have take him seriously but not literally”, “you have to take him literally but not seriously”. Run The Jewels and RTJ2 suffers from no such vagaries. There is no misinterpreting it. “A pope is a fraud, a church is a lie, a queen is the same damn thing you should pray to your fake god that she die”. How much worse does it have to get before this becomes an actual campaign slogan?