Run The Jewels HHV Records 16 Items

A duo like Kanye and Jay

The premise on which Run the Jewels are built sounds almost too good to be true: two rappers with considerable underground hype team up to turn U.S. hip-hop around as a supergroup with a string of only four albums. Along the way, the duo of El-P and Killer Mike counted sales in the millions and casually took home a Grammy nomination and an NME Award while touring with acts like Lorde and Rage Against the Machine. It all started in 2012, when El-P first sat behind the mixing desk for Killer Mike to produce his solo album R.A.P. Music: the chemistry was right, Killer Mike also appeared as a feature guest on El-P’s new record, and the two went on tour together. This resulted in a joint album, and as Run the Jewels the two released their self-titled debut in 2013 with the cover that would later vary again and again. El-P’s sometimes experimental, always diverse beats, and the way the two rappers complemented each other, resonated in the mainstream: the indie record entered the charts, and the Guardian even called it a better alternative to Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne collaboration, released two years earlier.

Cat sounds instead of beats

From the very beginning, Run the Jewels had made their music available as a free download. Such is the case with their second self-titled album, released just a year later, which continued to tell the story with its penchant for oldschool rhyming and socio-political lyrics on sometimes pounding, always texture-rich beats. The duo‘s cover artwork visually reinterprets the same symbolic image of two hands with each album: where the hands were intact on the debut record, they were now wrapped in bandages. “There was some injury and pain involved in this project, and that’s where the bandages came in. Something was healing or something was injured,” El-P said. And so the record is often about racism and police violence, as well as the different origins of the two rappers are reflected. At the same time, Run the Jewels showed themselves to be humorous: with Meow the Jewels, a remix album was released in 2015 on which large parts of the beats were replaced by cat noises. After a support show for Jack White and a summer full of big-name festival appearances, El-P and Killer Mike finally reunited in the studio in 2015 to record the third part of the Jewels saga. A year later, the record was released, and it hardly could have been more political and timely: “A riot is the language of the unheard,” they sampled Martin Luther King.

Always a microphone at the ready

Again and again, the two are referred to as a political rap crew, but they reject this pigeonholing: rather, Run the Jewels is the result of two friends who let off steam creatively – and what is said in the process takes second place for the time being. The duo’s lyrics also arise rather less from a political need, but often hit the rappers out of nowhere: “I can be sitting there for two hours, just smoking and talking shit, nothing going on … then something just speaks to me. We’ve got to the point now where we always have a mic ready,” Killer Mike said of his relentless lyrics. In the summer of 2020, the two would not only release their fourth album RTJ4, but also their own cannabis strain. They saw the new record as a protest work in the wake of the U.S. presidential election, and yet they never portray themselves as saviors when they are preaching tolerance. The record marked another milestone in a career of constant artistic growth – and as ingenious as it all is, it’s also not been planned, as El-P said, “The truth is is that we would be fucking lying if we were saying our plan worked. We didn’t have a fucking plan.”