Jewel Runners/BMG, June 3, 2020
Run The Jewels were made for these times.
On RTJ4, Run The Jewels are back and with exquisite timing. Accidental, perhaps. But exquisite nonetheless. Once again, Killer Mike and El-P bring a level of consciousness to their music that is at once universal. But they have this cool trick where they rap in universalities that seem to riff on specific current events. While this is really just a testament to how deeply entrenched the culture of injustice is in America, it kind of makes them seem especially perceptive.
Much like previous Run The Jewels records, RTJ4 gets pretty political pretty easily, going after voids of leadership, injustice, and inequality. Opener “yankee and the brave (ep. 4)” is one of my favorites on here, with Killer Mike recounting the story of Christopher Dorner, the ex-LAPD officer who went on a killing spree, and the LAPD response, seeking explanations for a disastrous string of events that gripped the city. “JU$T” offers up observant lines like “look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar”. “Walking in the snow” goes after a bunch of targets including schools and the news, but striking harder when El-P spits out timely lines like “funny fact about a cage, they’re never built for just one group”. And when Mike comes across both reflective and prescient with “every day on the evening news, they feed you fear for free, and you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me, and till my voice goes from a shriek to whisper ‘I can’t breathe”, it resonates like few other lines in recent memory.
All that said, Run The Jewels does some of their best stuff when they go a little more small screen, letting things get a little more personal. On the fantastic “goonies vs. E.T.”, Mike goes after the social media warriors that talk a good game and do nothing else of consequence. Even more striking, Mike addresses people comparing him to MLK and Malcolm X, offering up his wife’s response of “partner, I need a husband more than the world need another martyr”. It’s a kind of blown mind moment that goes after a reset of perspective, reminding us of the minefields that are being navigated and the sacrifices that are being demanded (actually serving as a unique counterpoint to the criticisms leveled in “goonies vs. E.T.” as mentioned above). This type of stuff hits so spot on and keeps you thinking all the way through.
The production on RTJ4 is anarchic, apocalyptic, cataclysmic noise. Like my favorite RTJ’s stuff from the past, I get most enamored with the loud banging tracks, but they also make room for nuance amongst the chaos. The machine precise jackhammer rhythms in “yankee” are plainly unnerving and perfect to open things up while “Ooh la la” rambles and sways, throwing in some piano and coming across like a sort of cousin to Gravediggaz “Constant Elevation”. On “out of sight”, the music is sort of dance-inducing, but blown-out and destroyed. Elsewhere, on “a few words”, RTJ work in some wonderful synths and really cool sax accents and “JU$T” goes pretty minimalist with skittering echo on the percussion and a lot of space left untouched. And on “the ground below”, they drive the radical and subversive point home by tossing in some Gang of Four guitar. Yea, a lot of it’s fairly chaotic and noisy and aggressive, but it’s also weirdly precise and crafted rather perfectly for the songs.
RTJ4 is pretty much fantastic. In a catalog that now runs 4 full-lengths deep, I’m not sure where this lands. I know right now I like it better than RTJ3. But RTJ and RTJ2 are two of my favorite rap albums of all time. And this one’s good enough to at least be in that realm. Take that for what it’s worth.
You might like this if:
- You like revolutionary rap, blistering history lessons, and aggressive banging noise
You might not if:
- You like music that doesn’t go after politics, music that stays opinionless or escapist
ryan is a reviewer and news editor for TGEFM. He’s very secretive, he might be an alien.
