Run the Jewels 2

Let's see if I can remember this.

We run the jewels in this town, a quarter pound on my person, I'm known for pounding the stage, I'm talkin' burning(?) and cursing,
Producer give me a beat, said it's the beat of the year, I say, El-P didn't do it, so get the fuck outta here,

Later, Mike spits,

Mercy me, merciless me, put a tear in they sad eye,
Skywalker talk, I'll be a true Darth Vader, I hit ya Marvin '03, but a G ain't adder(?).
So baby boy, you should tighten up and show some respect, before I Melvin on your (?) and put my arm on your neck, worse yet, be the reason your girl want a divorce, be at your crib, with your kid, saying Fuck your fort.

That's...about as much as I remember. Those were the lyrics of "Banana Clip", I believe, from their first self-titled album, straight out of my memory. I did not look up any lyrics at all, and I swear I used to remember more of them.

I used to love Run the Jewels. I mean, I still think they're great. Guiltily, I always gravitated toward Killer Mike; as you can see here, I remembered Mike's verses, his coarseness, his brutality, his bravado, over El-P's, but that probably has more to do with El-P being more of a painter than Mike; Mike is a devourer, he hungrily chews up the scenery and then spits it out in his own words.

Since the band's inception, they've been very consistent. Every album of theirs is unique. I think you may actually have the case here where fans can endlessly debate what their ranking of their albums are. I'll start; it's:

4 (2021) > 2 (2014) > 1 (2013) > 3 (2016)

Honestly, "1" and "3" are more equal than is conveyed here. "3" is their most public-facing one, and at times it can be quite preachy; furthermore, the visual imagery and their supervillain shtick are watered down in service of portraying themselves as anarchists. That being said, "3" has "A Report to the Shareholders / Kill Your Masters" where Mike has the incredible couplet,

Choose the lesser of the evils, the devil still gon' win, it can all be over tomorrow, kill our masters and start again,

and once the rampage of "Kill Your Masters" starts he coldly pronounces,

Mere mortals, the God's coming so miss me with the whoopty-de-woop, you take the Devil for God, look how he doin' you,

later,

Life'll get so bad it feel like God mad at you, but that's a feeling, baby, ever lose, I refuse, I disavow these foolish fools of they foolish view, I heard the revolution coming, you should spread the news,

following with one of my favorite lines ever, "Garvey mind, Tyson punch, this is bad news." There are few songs that pick me up and pump me up as this, and I wish "Legend Has It", "Stay Gold" and "Call Ticketron" were on different albums.

"1", however, has the most "song"-songs; it's a clean record with little spectacle but just solid rapping, as "Banana Clip", "36" Chain" and "Get It".

"RTJ4", I think, is their best; it has the longest sustain of good-great tracks of all four albums, starting with the menacing "Ooh La La" where Mike booms, "Ol' Dirty Bastard, go in your jaw, shimmy shimmy ya, / got the semi and the Henny, go and gimme, gimme ya". I would say the run ends "Walking in the Snow", where Gangsta Boo makes the hilarious observation, "First of all, they cheating, 'cause one of them is black and the other one white, so if if you don't like them you're automatically racist." You can argue the streak ends with "JU$T", that's fine.

And then, there's "2", which is when they made it big.

It opens with "Jeopardy", which begins with Mike screaming like a lunatic ("I'M GONNA BANG THIS BITCH THE FUCK OUT!"). Then, the synth purrs and Mike calms down, endowing himself with the demeanor of a predator:

I'm up at midnight, I'm dipping off in my Nizzikes, a gun and a metal pizzipe, a knizzife in my rizzight,

with El-P ending the track shouting, "Run the Jewels is the answer, your question is What's poppin'?"

And I mention El-P, whom I've rudely ignored this whole article, so I can now discuss one of my favorite verses of his, in "Oh My Darling (Don't Cry)", a track beginning with a chattering of voices that rattles your brain like a cage:

Fuck the law, they can eat my dick, that's word to Pimp,

to which he, nonchalantly, adds, "Hold up", as if he couldn't give less of a shit that he's keeping you waiting, while the drum track pummels. He then continues as if nothing has changed:

Fuck the law, they can eat my dick, that's word to Pimp, I don't fuck with or talk like all these fucking imps, style violent, give a fuck if you deny it, kids, you can all run backwards through a field of dicks!
Fuck the world, don't ask me for shit, that's word to B.I.G, I dreamt we owned the world but I woken up and it don't exist.

I know the theme of Run the Jewels is supervillainy, but that line, "I dreamt we owned the world but I woken up and it don't exist", always gave me chills. It's so nihilistic, so angry, so detached from it all; it began the blueprint for El-P and Mike to move from Saturday morning cartoon villainy into true "I'm taking all of you motherfuckers down with me" energy. This may be the most pivotal moment for the band's history, where they found a real outlet for very human rage and resentment. This is followed by Mike's

Me and El-P got time to kill, got folks to kill, on overkill, he hanging out the window, I hold the wheel, one black, one white, we shoot to kill,

Mike getting more and more excited as he racks up the death count, continuing,

That fuckboy life about to be repealed, that fuckboy shit about to be repelled, fuckboy Jihad, kill infidels, Allah Akbar, BOOM, from Mike and El,

with El-P taking over from Mike flawlessly, matching his energy perfectly, with

Life is hell, death's a bitch, and these FUBAR rulers getting rich, I cop a zip, it opens up, I smoke it up, go home and fuck.

I think some songs on other albums are better, but their chemistry and moreso their concept was perfected and purified on "Run the Jewels 2". "Oh My Darling Don't Cry" may be their most perfect song ever, in that it literally feels like you're going to get a heartache while listening to it (with El literally saying, "We run this spot like a Chinese sweatshop, / don't stop, work and work 'til his chest pop").

"Oh My Darling Don't Cry" is succeeded by the subwoofer-throttling, car-roof-rattling "Blockbuster Night Part 1" where, after their manifesto song, they suddenly get even more violent, with Mike spitting:

Bunches and bunches, punches is thrown until you're frontless, oodles and noodles, bang bullets at suckers' noodles, last album voodoo, PROVED that we was fucking brutal, I'm talking crazy, half past the clock is cuckoo,

with El coming in, escalating the purple nurple:

You itsy bitsy, furry frightened and fricking sickly, a little prickly, dick on display for winter swimming, look at these kiddies, Mike, I'mma rat-a-tat 'em for living, I deal in dirty work, do the deed in a dash (ditch 'em).

And I would be remiss if I omitted El's most pugnacious verse:

I'm the foulest, no need for any evaluations, I'm a phallus, a Johnson, a Jimmy spraying faces.

And...that's all I have to say about "Run the Jewels 2". The rest of the album is just more of that, with the first few songs being the most "fun" ones. Typically speaking the remainder of an album is an opportunity for the artist(s) to develop the material more in depth, and I don't really see that in RTJ's music (though there's the great Mike "Now who really run this? / Like who really run that man who say he run this?" in "Lie, Cheat, Steal"). There's the very dark imagery of "All Due Respect" that's fun: "This year we iller than a nun in a cumshot / getting double penetrated in a dope spot / by two hard piping niggas / on the orders of Marcellus to the soundtrack of 2Pac."

It's all just fun, it's all just silly, and they thrive on being evil. I remember a million years again seeing them in Pitchfork's "Over/Under" and Mike and El were shitting on Hulk Hogan but praising Rick Flair to the high heavens. They love heels: they love how the audience loves to hate heels. Of course, Zach de la Rocha in "Run the Jewels 2" gave their criminal duo a philosophical motivation, but for the most part their joy is in defying the society that once trod on them (and this is true: besides Mike's brief flirting with radio stardom via OutKast, both came up from the underground, they are bona-fide indie artists).

I guess I'll tackle on this subject as it came to me while writing this: I distinctly remember this album, at the time, introducing the concept that the villain may have noble intentions and that the line between hero and villain is quite murky. This was also around the time of Disney's "Guardians of the Galaxy" (2014) and "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (2015) and Zack Snyder's "Batman v Superman". ("Breaking Bad" (2008 - 2013) also just ended.) There may be other influences, but basically: this is when the concept of grey morality entered the mainstream, a little after the time the Obama administration was handling Snowden and the Patriot Act and drone strikes.

I do remember this concept being novel. I know it's stupid to use "South Park" as a bellwether for the times, but in "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce" they didn't depict the Bush admin as evil so much as they were stupid. In fact, the writers never depicted any political entity as evil, except anti-smoking advocates, interestingly. This is in sharp contrast to "Let Go, Let Gov" where Liane has to convince Cartman that Santa's torture is necessary for the security of the country. Really, the beginning of the 2010s was the rise of the contrarian.

Now everyone thinks contrarians are ass.

I do wonder if this is one of the reasons why Mike and El-P haven't released anything for the last 6 years (that, and growing older, and moving onto other projects, etc). It's one thing to question morality and proceed to ask questions and complicate the concept of right and wrong, but if your only position is to muddle then it becomes evident that compulsion is based on power. And that's where we are right now: after a decade of abusing the allure of the heel, all that's left is brutality, the pageantry of power and privilege. We create an Ourobouros of cynicism where the only thing the cycle guarantees is death.

I dunno where this all leads to, but I think we're all done with anti-heroes. Or, what I mean is, I think we're all done with posing anti-heroes as heroes, which, you know, forgets what an anti-hero actually is. There's probably a whole essay wherein I can discuss how the English-speaking world is enamored by the archetypal bad-boy outsider (America's Billy the Kid, England's Oliver Cromwell, Australia's Bushrangers (and, to a substantial extent, America's Lost Cause revisionism); I can't think of a French and German equivalent off the top of my head, as there is a distinction between a criminal and a rogue) and yet we've been deluged with this type of character for a billion years now.

I guess what I mean is: it'd be nice if El and Mike made a simple album where they're villains again. No complicated backstory, no narrative, just really good stunting. But we can't put everything on the times - I think there's a similar case with the Wu-Tang Clan, where the group couldn't return to "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)" (1993), there's just a point where you have to mature and develop as artists and can't look back. The GZA who once sang "Throw your shitty drawers in the hamper, / next time, come strapped with a fucking Pamper" is not the same who would go on to create "Labels"; the Ghostface who rapped "Speaking of the devil, psych, no it's the God, get your shit right" in seven years would have the sense of humor to smoothly say "You think I fell off the ledge? / The legendary Ghost Deini might be dead?" At least on their last song "A Few Words For The Firing Squad", they rode off into the sunset, leaving as legends.