Album Review: Run the Jewels - RTJ4
Fade in: exterior, New York City, dusk. The city, like countless others across the United States, is awash in political strife; another innocent black man lies dead, brutally murdered in cold blood by an uncaring police officer (read: a police officer). Citizens swarm the streets, laden with signs, chants, righteous fury, and an incessant demand for meaningful change. Mobilized against them are the armed enforcers of the tyrannical state, ready to stamp out dissent in the name of an authoritarian, colonial empire at least as horrible as any in modern history. Suddenly, a speck of light appears in the distance: it’s Killer Mike and El-P, a.k.a. Yankee and the Brave (apparently), a.k.a. Run the Jewels! One of the most renowned forces in political hip hop today, the injustice-fighting duo has returned when the people needed them most to call out the most rampant evils of society, and sound badass while doing it. Mike and El are back, and while they don’t mean no harm, they truly mean all the disrespect.
At least, that’s what you might think this album represents if you listened to the group’s most ardent fans, who seek to elevate what is admittedly good music with an occasional political bent into something far greater. In reality, the power and relevance their records possess is woefully overstated, and despite the timing of its release RTJ4 is no different. Their previous venture, Run the Jewels 3, was their most successfully political album, yet suffered greatly from a bloated tracklist that demonstrated just how tedious and unvarying the duo’s formula had become. This time around the runtime has seen sufficient pruning, and the difference is quite noticeable: RTJ4 quickly asserts itself as possibly the best Run the Jewels project yet, though its greatly improved production can happily claim much of the credit for this. No doubt Killer Mike and El-P have much to say, but while issues like police brutality and inequality in America are more pertinent than ever, Run the Jewels are only occasionally able to deliver capable insight on these topics, and the upper limits of their style have sadly never been clearer.
Let it not be said, however, that Run the Jewels have ever been unable to bring the hype when it suits them: yankee and the brave (ep. 4) is by far the best opening to any of their records, and perfectly sets the tone for such an uproarious experience. Killer Mike’s opening words (“Back at it like a crack addict, Mr. Black Magic/Crack a bitch back, chiropractic, Craftmatic”) are each backed by a deafening snare hit, and the tension only builds as the track goes on. The two seasoned rappers trade off self-assured verses with a palpable ease, but El-P is already eager to take more profound shots at the wealthiest member of society: “It’s scammer bliss when you puttin’ villains in charge of shit/All of us targeted, all we doin’ is arguin’/Pardon them as they work until every pocket’s been picked and soul been harvested”. The track is at once a refresher on what exactly makes Run the Jewels kick so much ass, an opportunity for Mike and El to flex their most arrogant flows, and a flashy retelling of the duo pulling off a cop-killing guerrilla hit-and-run straight out of The A-Team. The sample-heavy out of sight begins with the two rappers trading bars in a nimble display of coordination, and the lines only get better as they diverge, with both Mike (“We the motivating, devastating, captivating/Ghost and Rae relating product of the fuckin’ ‘80s”) and El (“I know you just about mcfuckin’ had it, our shit is just magic”) being a joy to listen to. As lyrically dense as their verses are, with Run the Jewels it’s often more fun to simply turn your brain off and be swallowed by the enormity of Mike and El’s charisma, and 2 Chainz fits right at home alongside their dynamic, packing a slick flow and amusing bars of his own: “I slide on tracks like home plate/Ride beats like road rage/Got a crib in like four states”.
Run the Jewels bring to RTJ4 the same punchy declarations and roguish energy as always, but behind the boards El-P has stepped up his production to exuberant new heights, emulating earlier favourites like Oh My Darling Don’t Cry and Call Ticketron while maintaining their turbulent energy throughout the entire record. Where Run the Jewels 2 (often considered the peak of their discography) loses much of its momentum around the halfway point and never truly recovers, RTJ4 saves some of its most powerful moments for the latter half: the synth-heavy never look back, the old-school chorus and guitar shredding on the ground below (note the Gang of Four sample), the eerie and subtle pulling the pin with El-P’s jaw-dropping introductory couplet: “From a long line of the rancidest swine came the violators/The cloven foot designers of high crime for the iron ages”. That said, even a veteran is prone to mistakes from time to time, even if they often present as questionable choices in production rather than outright blunders. walking in the snow is the most obvious, the acidic and irritating instrumental compounding with the garish stock sound effects slathered all over the track, and Gangsta Boo’s presence on the chorus does the song no favours. El-P’s opening lines are inundated with clumsy, convoluted rhyme schemes, and Killer Mike’s retread of his verse on the previous track hardly fares better.
Luckily, the features on the next track JU$T add some much needed variety, even if Pharrell and Mike’s incessant repetition of the hook (“Look at all these slave masters posin’ on yo’ dollar”) wears out the line’s bite before the intro is even finished. El-P’s slick energy still manages to steal the show between his referential wit (“Got a Vonnegut punch for your Atlas Shrug”) and politically charged ire (“The X on the map where the pain keep hitting/Just us ducks here sitting/Where murderous chokehold cops still earnin’ a living”), but Mike’s stuttered flow is a nice compliment to the bouncy production full of thudding bass. For similar reasons, ooh la la is difficult to hate; even if the hook is perhaps the most regrettable moment on the project, the subdued piano line that drives the beat provides a welcome break from the manic energy threatening to consume the rest of the album. RTJ4 finds both El-P’s production and pen game at their most consistently stellar; it’s a shame the same cannot be said of Killer Mike, whose bars fall flat at a disturbing rate. Lyrics like “You’ve been hypnotized and Twitter-ized by silly guys” (goonies vs. E.T.) or “And your country gettin’ ran by a casino owner” (JU$T) lack the punch expected of a rapper famous for telling listeners to “kill your masters” (he even references that same call to arms on this record). The tension between Mike’s exaggerated rap persona and his milquetoast activist work has begun to bleed into the music itself, to its detriment: while the sentiment behind a line like “Not a holy man but I’m moral in my perversiveness/So I support the sex workers unionizing their services” is appreciated, one expects more than such plain, unimaginative terms of a rapper so often touted for his wordplay.
For almost a decade now, Run the Jewels has been a much-appreciated opportunity for two grizzled veterans of the music industry to flex their political inclinations, while also having fun doing so. What made them so appealing to so many, though, can be attributed to a truth self-evident since the release of Killer Mike’s 2012 album R.A.P. Music: two is so, so often better than one. When Mike and El-P come together, the synthesis of their abilities carries them beyond the limits of their individual genius, yet even as they continue to refine their formula, the fruits of their persona threaten to become conventional. While El-P is pulling this much of the weight when it comes to Run the Jewels as a vehicle for social commentary, it becomes clearer than ever that creative beats and hard-hitting punchlines can only carry you so far, and the duo are sorely in need of some fresh ideas. Make no mistake: these criticisms are not uttered because RTJ4 is bad, or average, or even merely good. This is a great album that overcomes many of the flaws of its predecessors, but more than ever before the uniformity of the duo’s style threatens to wholly consume their artistic talent, and it is uncertain how much longer they can stave off the decay of their purpose.
8.5/10
Favourite Tracks: yankee and the brave (ep. 4), out of sight, goonies vs. E.T.