Happy 10th Anniversary to Run The Jewels’ eponymous debut album Run The Jewels, originally released June 26, 2013.
Run The Jewels are one of my favorite success stories of the 21st century. Two highly skilled, respected, and groundbreaking hip-hop artists build a friendship and musical partnership, coming together to form a group almost on a whim. What results is a rebirth for each member of the duo, who soon reach heights of popularity together that neither achieved at any earlier point in their career on their own.
That’s the story of Michael “Killer Mike” Render and Jaime “El-P” Meline over the last decade. By the early 2010s, each of them had built respectable careers. Atlanta native Mike made himself known as a bruising member of the Dungeon Family collective, recording a handful of critically acclaimed solo projects. El-P was an underground/independent hip-hop hero, as an emcee, producer, and record label head; he was a member of Company Flow and the creator of the Definitive Jux imprint, both of which shaped the musical sensibilities of left-of-center hip-hop heads from the late 1990s and well into the 2000s.
In the early 2010s, Jason DeMarco of the Cartoon Network introduced the pair to each other, and it turned into hip-hop magic, with El-P producing the entirety of Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music (2012). That collaboration led to a tour to support each of their solo albums, which eventually resulted in the two deciding to form Run The Jewels. Their initial self-titled effort was released 10 years ago for free download through Fool’s Gold Records and nothing has been the same since.
In an expansive interview with the What Had Happened Was podcast, El-P explained that the idea for the album came together with very little planning towards the end of that aforementioned tour. El was feeling inspired and told Mike that after they were done on the road, he was going to head to the recording studio he’d found in upstate New York. He had been working on some beats and had the inkling of an idea for a project that he’d call “Run The Jewels,” based on a concept that he’d been kicking around for a while. Mike told him “I’ll come jump on that shit,” and the rest, as they say, is history.
El said he and Mike spent about two weeks in the isolated studio, accompanied by El’s beat-making partner Taco, where they “smoked weed, took shrooms, drank, and knocked probably 70% percent of the album.” The music flowed with ease, helped by the lack of expectations and pressure. Furthermore, since they were now working as a duo, it alleviated any feeling that either one of them had to individually carry the project’s weight on their own.
“We both were taking it as a break from maybe ourselves,” El-P said on the aforementioned podcast, “because we’re both pretty intense when we’re artists on our own.”
El said after that initial two-week recording session, they played it for a few people, including DeMarco. Everyone who heard it encouraged the duo to record a few more songs in order to create a full-length project.
El-P said the name “Run The Jewels” was inspired by LL Cool J’s “Cheesy Rat Blues.” The track, which appears on Uncle L’s “comeback” album Mama Said Knock You Out (1990), features a fictional version of LL who watched his fame evaporate and lost everything in the process. With nothing more to lose, he turns to robbing people in the streets. “It fit because it felt like that’s where we were,” El said. “It felt like we had both hit rock bottom before we met, and then our energy and what we were together was this renewed fierceness. … We may be going down, but we’re going down shooting.”
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El-P has said making the project available for free was a big part of his conception of the project. These days, just about every album is free, as long as you’re willing to use a streaming service. But 10 years ago, this was not a common sentiment. “Giving it away for free was a philosophical statement,” El-P said. “We don’t have anything to offer except this music. … The only thing that I have, I’m giving to you as a down-payment on what I hope will be a relationship.”
It's still amazing to me that an album as unconventional as Run The Jewels connected with audiences like it did. The project is a near nonstop sonic assault. Almost every song involves El-P and Mike verbally battering down the door, vomiting lyrical malice to a hyper-aggressive soundtrack, and radiating a mixture of pure cool and blistering contempt. The energy of the beats matches the verses, pumping with churning musical adrenaline. It’s a brisk, half-an-hour endeavor, but one that continues to have massive replay value. I remember listening to this album at work the first day that it dropped, and being worried that the power of the music would compel me to beat a manager into unconsciousness with the wastebasket at my desk.
Even though just about every song on Run The Jewels would make for a perfect opening track, “Run The Jewels” is a legitimately perfect album opener. The beat is barely organized chaos, filled with organs, keys, and percussion breakdowns. It features dub influences, as horns and guitars filter in and out. Overall, it hits like repeated roundhouse kicks to the chest. El and Mike lean heavily into imagery of wild canines to convey their persistent hunger as artists. “These streets is full with the wolves that starve for the week so they after the weak,” Mike raps. “In a land full of lambs, I am, and I'll be damned if I don’t show my teeth.”
Mike may have cultivated his status as one of the best emcees breathing on R.A.P. Music, but he’s in rare form on Run The Jewels. He stomps through “Banana Clipper,” spraying the audience with verbal napalm, even as he “moves with the elegance of an African elephant.” Mike drops two of the project’s most memorable lines, first proclaiming, “Producer gave me a beat, said ‘It’s the beat of the year’ / I said ‘El-P didn't do it, so get the fuck outta here!’” Later he raps, “I sent they mom a little cash and a sympathy letter / Told her she raised a bunch of fuck-boys, next time do better, bitch!”
“Banana Clipper” features a verse from Big Boi, the only rapper to drop a guest verse on the album. Daddy Fat Sacks sticks his whole foot in the track, rhyming with a ferocity rarely heard by him on OutKast albums or his solo projects. “Now it's true, n****s are simply simple-minded, Simple Simons,” he raps. “Being dumbed down by the local radio stations by designing.”
Much of Run The Jewels’ musical approach was inspired by acts like Run-DMC, who both Mike and El-P grew up listening to. Multiple tracks on the project take their sonic cues from the raw, pounding hip-hop made by hip-hop’s first “new school” group. “36 Inch Chain” is a thunderous ode to ’80s hip-hop, as the pair of juggernauts operate as “a young Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.” “Get It” features the duo’s most back-to-basics approach on the project, with the two rhyming to a thumping drum track and keyboards. “All I got is this rap shit, all I want is a castle,” El-P raps. “And to move like a man with a minimum of harassment.”
“No Come Down” is a trippy, disorienting ride, with both members describing their experiences with mind-altering substances. El-P goes to some pretty dark places, describing how drugs numb his damaged psyche. In contrast, Mike takes a transcendental mental excursion while in the VIP room of a strip club. Blasted out of his gourd on mushrooms, he paints his journey through time and different dimensions with his private dancer, melding souls and traversing entire lifetimes, experiencing “true romance in one lap dance.”
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“Job Well Done,” featuring British band Until the Ribbon Breaks, is an exercise in bombastic excess. Mike sounds particularly ferocious, rapping “Woo! They done let that fucking Mike out / It’s like Tyson in the ’80s: n***a snap and punch your lights out, yeah! / It’s like Tyson in the ’90s, if I'm losing, take a bite out.” Meanwhile, El-P outlines how the potency of their music causes extreme acts. “Monks will immolate themselves until the record hits the shelves,” he raps. “Yetis walk right out the woods to cop it without thinking ’bout it / Workers at the sweatshop kill they boss to how the vets drop / Worker ants surround their queen and chew the bitch’s head off.”
“Twin Hype Back” is the most aggressively and intentionally offensive song on the album. Over morbid keyboards and rhythmic congas, Mike and El personify the “Don’t Give a Fuck” attitude within their verses. “This is dope as that hard white you stuff in a crack pipe,” Mike raps. “A hit of this, a kid with Tourette's will chill out and act right.”
The pair enlist Prince Paul to reprise his “Chest Rockwell” role from Handsome Boys Modelling School. As Rockwell, Paul manages to be as disturbing as possible throughout the song’s breaks. He plays his sleaziness to the hilt, slipping Molly into unsuspecting women’s Mountain Dew, while making devious plans involving a glass of Beefeater, a brand new deck of Uno cards, and a trip to Long John Silver’s. Apparently, El encouraged Paul to say as much of “the worst things you could possibly say” while under the Rockwell guise, even when Paul was a little apprehensive.
“I think there was something brazenly politically incorrect about some of the shit we were doing as well,” El-P said on the WHHW podcast. “But it wasn’t incorrect in the way that people knew that we were actually attacking anybody or any malevolence behind it. I think there’s room for political incorrectness if everyone is in on the joke, not if there’s a victim at the end of the joke. … We weren’t making fun of you, we were making fun of us.”
Occasionally Run The Jewels veers into more serious territory. “DDFH” (as in “Do Dope, Fuck Hope”) may have a tongue in cheek title, but both emcees depict grim visions of an often dystopian present and increasingly bleak future. Other songs, like “Sea Legs,” are as confrontational as anything that either emcee has ever recorded. Mike possibly targets prominent contemporaries like Kanye West, 50 Cent, and Jay-Z during his verse, all in the spirit of competition. After proclaiming that “There will be no respect for The Thrones,” Mike adds, “Your idols all are my rivals, I rival all of your idols / I stand on towers like Eiffel, I rifle down all your idols / N****s will perish in Paris; n****s is nothing but parrots / I write for the writers that write for the liars that impress you and your parents.”
“A Christmas Fucking Miracle” couldn’t have been anything except Run the Jewels’ final statement. It’s the type of pensive, introspective effort that El and Mike would record to close Cancer 4 Cure (2012) and R.A.P. Music respectively, and later use on the sequels to this project. Each emcee recalls their respective beginnings, describing how they found inspiration through musical careers to change the world.
Run The Jewels was originally intended to be a one-off project. However, the album caught fire in a way that neither ever conceived. Both Mike and El have frequently talked about how the success of their initial Run The Jewels tour provided the inspiration to keep going as a group. Each emcee would first perform individual sets, then come together to close the show as the group. As they toured the world, they noticed that they were attracting a type of audience that they had rarely seen at previous tours either separately or together.
The crowds that they now attracted were younger, and more aware of their Run The Jewels output than their material as solo artists. It shocked them both. “We had done what we had set out to do, which was right the train on the tracks a little bit,” El-P said, “but the destination was never discussed.”
Hence, after having a blast performing in front of crowds of 500 or so, they decided to give it another shot, and nearly immediately set out to record a sequel, RTJ2 (2014). A decade later, Run The Jewels have released three more albums. Each one has been free, even during the pre-streaming years. The duo performs in front of much larger crowds, often rocking stadiums at various musical festivals, and have become a genuine musical phenomenon. It’s heart-warming, even while they may make you want to knock someone’s teeth down their throat.
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