Who hasn’t heard it (possibly, thought it)? “They just don’t make music like they used to” or “Music nowadays is just not good anymore”. Every time I hear something along these lines, I find that it is both irritating and motivating – what a great chance to make a case against this foolishness!
People point back to ”Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975) and then to “Gucci Gang”(2017), and make the case that things have gone to the muck — well, yeah, if we compare a great, lyrically flourishing avant-garde hymn to a proactively mindless, hiphop hype tune, surely we will find a downward trend.
But what about the fact that we of course a) remember classics as classics, because they stood out from the rest in their time (read: there was plenty of less-immortal music that has been forgotten) and b) there is plenty of music that is the best of the best today, but might have not made its way to your ears, because digital music distribution tends to swamp us with the big thing, if we don’t dig in on our own. Not to mention that the evergreen status takes a while to chrystalize.
In the same vein as this, a while back someone claimed to me that it’s a drag there’s no political rap anymore. Now, I’m probably more like ambivalent about Rap than a full-fledged “head”, but here I could shoot from the hip.
Run The Jewels is the collaboration of rapper/producer El-P and rapper/activist Killer Mike. The two of them were introduced in 2011, leading to El-P producing Mike’s upcoming record, and spiraling onwards to a full-blown rap album with the two of them – RTJ1 (2013) – and another three (or more, depending on your count) thereafter.
Set aside the fact that there is a ton of fun and/or clever self-mythologizing chest-beating, as rap tends to have, that they crowdsourced a cat version of RTJ2 (Meow The Jewels [2015]) that replaced the backing tracks with cat sounds, and the fact that their videos can come close to stealing the show – Run The Jewels have and continue to get their might from the social commentary, and the often anthemic beats that drive them home.
Across four albums, there are many brilliant songs, making it hard to choose one to hold up here. Musically, my personal favorite is RTJ3 (2016), which hits sonically with beats that give me the shakes. Lyrically, their latest, RTJ4 (2020), has some of the verses that I find hit hardest – maybe because they hit closest to home, being the most recent.
When Mike’s verse on the live version of “Walking in the Snow” halts on
And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me
And ’til my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, “I can’t breathe”
the music cutting for a good 25 seconds, you can’t help but have it have an impact.
As if they need any more credit, Zack De La Rocha (legendary frontman of Rage Against The Machine) has been featuring on their songs for years:
But the breath in me is weaponry
For you, it’s just money.
There’s always a reason to raise your voice. Sometimes more than others. Luckily, we have people to remind us that despite the bleak reality ahead, a battle cry can have the power to pierce walled borders.
Never forget, in the story of Jesus, the hero was killed by the state.
Coryphe 