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Upfront: Run the Jewels

Where to find some hope

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For the better part of last year Atlanta rapper Killer Mike spent his time attached to the grassroots campaign of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. A man some deemed the sole beacon of hope for a true representative of the disenfranchised. In January 2017, we know how that shit turned out.

Meanwhile, his Brooklynite partner-in-crime in Run The Jewels, El-P, made sure his Twitter feed spoke for him. At one point, he even announced he was banning himself from wearing red hats after realising the connotations attached to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign. With each waging their own war against tyrants, many fans anxiously waited for their latest collaborative effort in Run The Jewels 3. But predictions that we’d hear the duo delve deep into the political realm and prepare a fiery response to the election were mostly unfounded. In fact, RTJ3 is actually their most diverse, complex, and realised effort so far. It’s the dose of dope we’ve come to expect — with some hope thrown in for good measure.

“We don’t make records about elections, we make records about life and ourselves. And we make records that are just about being dope,” El-P explains. “I think that we gave them our hearts on this record and we gave them all of the shit that we love.” There are two things that El-P and Mike are most passionate about: “Nasty-ass style, and saying something that’s important to us when it arises.” While those moments certainly course through the album, erupting in some of its most visceral arrangements, RTJ’s third project is about establishing that they’re here to stay, and that they’re absolutely unfuckwittable. It’s a proclamation that when toupee-wearing, orange-blotched billionaires see their last day in the sun, El-P and Killer Mike will cast a looming shadow from the top of the pile, still dope as hell.

RTJ3 runs the gamut of vibes, from the soulful (‘Down’), to the militant (‘Kill Your Masters’), all the way to the confessional (‘Thursday In The Danger Room’) and the absurdly catchy (‘Call Ticketron’). And of course, there’s still room for unrelenting, straight-spittin’ on songs like ‘Panther Like A Panther’ — a track El-P and Mike both said would have been incomplete without the voice Miami’s self-proclaimed baddest bitch Trina. With such a varying array of sounds, subject matter, and sidekicks, it’s surprisingly the album’s cool-and-collected opener ‘Down’ that’s positioned as one of its most explosive moments. Sounding like a gully Morgan Freeman at the end of Shawshank Redemption, Mike busts down the door and spits the first bars we hear: “I hope / I hope with the highest of hopes / That I never have to go back to the trap / And my days of dealing with dope.”

“That’s what the ‘80s were for me, as a kid, and I hope that — just period — I hope no other kid has to make some of the decisions that people my age had to make,” Mike says earnestly. As the verse we hear first up from the project, it’s likely a moment of relief for those fans that’ve been waiting on RTJ to tell them that everything just might be okay.  “At the end of the day even though we may dip into some dark territory, this Run The Jewels shit is about hope,” El-P says. But he’s quick to clarify that it’s an empowered kind of hope — not that anyone would ever possibly pick these two as passive entities. “It’s not hope like ‘oh gosh, I hope that something good happens’—it’s hope like ‘we got this shit if we want it’ — and that’s what Run The Jewels is about,” he says.

Mike has a longer list of hopes, reminiscent of Bernie’s initial platform: particularly that we figure out how to feed, clothe, and provide water to the people that need it without putting a price tag on it. He hopes that humans can grow past their obsession with money, and curb how quickly they tend to oppress others when they get it too. Unfortunately, it’s only Mike’s last hope that seems practical under America’s new regime: “I just hope that our music gives people some joy to push through — and not even to push through because life is bad — but to push through because sometimes stuff you like doing is hard too, and you need dope music to accomplish that,” he says.

There’s no doubt that’s what they’ve brought to the table since the official inception of the odd couple pairing in 2013. At this point, it’s almost banal to discuss how different the two seemed on paper. Now, Run The Jewels has an illustrious legacy for the two to uphold together, and there’s an expectation for an exemplary product every single time they step up in the booth. It’s a reputation that automatically drops them into the conversation for the upper tiers of end-of-year-lists, and allows their rabid super-fans the fodder they need to argue that their favourite rappers are still better than any of yours. To reach the point of having that storied history, and the brolic back-catalogue to match, there’s no surprise that there’s been a steep learning curve attached –in a multitude of facets.

“It’s been one of the greatest growth spurts I’ve had,” Mike says. “We were both nasty coming in to it, but getting the opportunity to play on a team with a player that’s just nasty, it forces you to push yourself.” From a pure skill-level, Mike has embraced the opportunity to stand next to El-P, a man that motivates him further, that he can borrow from, and be inspired by. As a solo emcee, he says, there’s a ceiling — once you have what works for you all figured out, it’s very easy to fall into an endless loop of attempting to replicate that over and over again. As a duo, there’s a continual push for forward momentum. “Being in a group sharpens that sense because not only are you competing with your own will to get comfortable, but you have someone right next to you running, encouraging you, like ‘let’s do it!” Mike says.

But the stylistic changes are what you might expect to hear about from music collaborators. Instead, it’s much deeper than that — the impacts of the project have bled into their day-to-day too. “I have learned to more effectively communicate as a collaborator with El, which has made me a better communicator with my kids, with my wife, with other human beings period,” Mike notes. “In terms of communicating, the group has been one of the greatest growth agents I’ve had, and I’m happy for that.”

El-P feels a sense of gratitude as well. “If I hadn’t hooked up with Run The Jewels, I might have been bored or I might have just moved on,” he admits. It’s lucky for us that the two managed to find each other at a time when they were equally receptive to changing directions. “I think that when we met, we were both individually figuring some shit out, but we both had the same idea that we wanted to approach our careers and our music in a healthier way,” he says. “It’s been nothing but good for me as a person.”

Fast-forward to their third LP, where the two feel they’re perfectly in sync, that sense of ease made for a very different type of record. “There’s this new, exciting thing in my life that I know that when I sit in a room with my partner, as much as I might have an idea or vibe for something, you never know what the fuck is going to happen,” El-P says. “Really, what you’re doing is simultaneously creating that space where our styles and our minds and our hearts intersect,” he says. The level of comfort the duo have established is the reason for their newly-bared vulnerabilities on this record — one song even touches on the deaths of some of their closest friends. “I don’t think you would have ever heard a ‘Thursday In The Danger Room’ had I not felt safe in the confines of Run The Jewels to do it,” Mike reveals.

The gradual transformation of the Run The Jewels project into a “safe space” extends far beyond El-P and Killer Mike though. Together, their differences have allowed them to represent and reflect a plethora of views, values and opinions of people the world over — and fans are tapping into that sense of comfort too, even if some might not feel as welcome in their own country as they did a few months ago. “There’s something that glazes over all the complication and all of the stress that we’re all putting our minds through trying to figure out what the fuck are we supposed to do with this life, just seeing a couple of people really genuinely having the time of their lives and making the dopest shit they’ve ever made together,” El-P says. For fans, the fact that we’ve reached a third instalment from such an unlikely partnership is the perfect reminder of Mike and El-P’s foremost philosophy — that we’ve all still got this shit if we want it. “That’s one of the things I truly hope,” Mike says. “That we can be an example that the ‘isms’ don’t have to get in the way of friendship, love, and opportunities to do good shit together.”

RTJ3 is out now.

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