I still remember the first time I listened to Run The Jewels. I remember seeing this rap group had released an album on Christmas Day. “That’s weird,” I thought to myself, “Why would someone release a non Christmas album on Christmas Day?” Low and behold, a few weeks later I saw some online chatter about it, so I decided to check it out.
I had no idea what to expect going into this, but from the first listen to their third album, I knew it was something I hadn’t heard before. El-P’s production banged harder and had more bass than most trap artists. Their aggression was unlike any hip hop artists I had heard up to that point. They sounded forward thinking, but yet had the lyrics and flows of old school artists. They appeal to people like my dad who prefer old school hip hop. They appeal to the people that just want to hear banging beats. They appeal to the lyrical hip hop heads that want to hear the protest lyrics. No matter what kind of hip hop you like, they appeal to you in some capacity.
After putting out three albums in four years, they decided to take a bit of a break from making new projects. Even though they weren’t making new music, they never went away. They did multiple headlining tours in the U.S. and Europe, opened for Lorde on her 2018 stadium tour around the U.S., making multiple new songs for FIFA and the new Venom movie, and even making multiple beers based on their songs. Their song "Legend Has It" also became very popular in commercials and movie trailers. It was in the Black Panther trailer, Lexus commercials, and was in the movie Baby Driver. They even denied the NFL’s attempt to use it, citing that the NFL shouldn’t be fining players for kneeling for the national anthem (they also said the NFL offered “zero dollars” to use the song). Needless to say, they’ve been pretty busy even without making a new album.
This album couldn’t have come at a better time either. With all these protests going on, Run The Jewels’s music has never felt more urgent. Their music is deeply political and is similar to what Rage Against The Machine and Public Enemy were back in the day. RTJ was even supposed to go on tour with Rage Against The Machine this year before it all got cancelled due to coronavirus. Killer Mike, one half of the duo, is outspoken about his beliefs and has also provided one of the most heartfelt speeches of the protests. He’s an adamant supporter of Bernie Sanders, who even introduced RTJ for their 2016 Coachella performance. These politics and social issues come through in their music heavily, especially on this album.
The song "Walking in the Snow" is the biggest example of this on RTJ4. El-P provides a great opening verse that provides his view on many issues, one being about ICE and how they treat kids. Towards the end of the verse, he poses the question, “Pseudo-Christains, y’all indifferent, kids in prison ain’t a sin? Shit, if even one scrap of what Jesus taught connected, you’d feel different,” calling out Christians who paint themselves as perfect but then turn a blind eye to seeing kids locked up in cages in the government’s custody.
But Killer Mike’s verse on the song is where all the attention is. After tearing down the prison to school pipeline, he then paints an encounter of police brutality, “And everyday on the evening news, they feed you fear for free. And 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 breath.’ And you sit there in your house and watch it on TV. The most you give’s a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy.” Obviously, we take that line to be about what happened to George Floyd, but he wrote the line back in 2019 as a reference to the murder of Eric Garner. The realization that this has happened not only once before, but enough that we as a public can’t even remember which one it is, says a lot about the state of our country and how desensitized we are to horrors like this.
Mike even ends his verse on another powerful comparison, “All of us serve the same masters, all of us nothin’ but slaves. Never forget in the story of Jesus, the hero who was killed by the state.” Especially with the current protests, Mike is saying that Christians should remember what happened to Jesus and how that compares to what’s currently happening in the country. Saying that maybe people should take a hard look at what’s happening and actually pick a side instead of just ignoring people getting murdered by the government, because they would’ve ignored their Lord and Savior getting murdered by the government if they stayed on the sideline.
RTJ 4 is a tight 11 tracks and is just under 40 minutes in length, and it follows a similar formula to their older albums. The bangers are at the beginning, and it slowly gets more socially conscious as the album progresses, with maybe a banger or two thrown in to break up the flow. Which is my biggest “flaw” if you can call it with this album. As great as everything is, it feels so easy for them. I think they could make an album of this quality at least once a year if they really wanted to. El-P always seems to push the production to be more aggressive and futuristic, his bars are always full of lyrical acrobatics that always impress, Killer Mike always brings his booming voice and personal lyrics, and the album’s are almost always about the same length. It’s a bit predictable at this point. But even though it’s predictable, that doesn’t take away from how great this project is.
The project starts with "Yankee and The Brave (ep. 4)", a hard hitting intro that’s just them setting the tone. The title seems to be a nickname for the group, as El-P is from NYC where the Yankees play, and Killer Mike is from Atlanta where the Braves play. "Ooh La La" is an old school, boom bap style song where they get more conscious with the lyrics. The video plays into it as well, as it’s a giant dance party happening in the streets of NYC with a pile of burning money in the middle, as if to say that money isn’t the most important thing in life, happiness is.
The next two songs feature two of the best beats on the album. "Out of Sight" with 2 Chainz features some aggressive vocal chops from an old school R&B song called Misdemeanor by Foster Sylvers. El-P somehow makes this 70s R&B cut into a banger that sounds like it could be 50 years in the future. The next song, "Holy Calamafuck", features a great beat switch, one of many on the album. The second half of the song features these muted tabla hits with some vocals that sound like a sample, and it just comes together to create a perfect bridge, even without any lead vocals. It reminds me of the bridge for their hit Legend Has It, where El-P has a similar breakdown that just shows how insane of a producer he is!
"JU$T" is another highlight on the album, especially with its features from Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha. Pharrell brings maybe the most memorable hook on the album, where he says, “Look at all these slave masters posin’ on your dollar.” They point out the contradiction that even though public consensus is that slavery is wrong, most of the faces on our dollars owned slaves at one point in their lives. Why do we still consider these men as important enough to be represented on something everyone in the country owns, considering they owned other human beings? Zack de la Rocha comes through with probably the best feature verse on the album, just like his features on their previous two albums. He’s almost considered a third member of Run The Jewels at this point. He proves he can still rap just as well now as he did almost 30 years ago when Rage Against the Machine was formed.
Overall, this is easily one of the best hip hop albums so far in 2020! If you’ve listened to a Run The Jewels album before, you know what to expect from this. This album lives up to the expectations that all their fans have, but it also provides a good introduction to the duo. El-P and Killer Mike continue to be the voices for the change on here, with even more socially conscious lyrics than before. They inspire you to fight for what you believe in, and to put your whole being behind these beliefs. As Killer Mike ends the album, “Go hard, last words to the firing squad was, ‘Fuck you too.’”
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