RTJ4 dropped a week after George Floyd’s murder and a few months after COVID-19 hit the world stage. In retrospect, the most painful aspect of 2020 wasn’t the horrific events themselves. It’s the blinding realization that the world is just the same as it was before. No major legislation addressing police brutality passed; no overdue reckoning with racism—the policy normalization of reparations, say—happened. The global public health system hasn’t made the changes necessary to prevent or contain the next pandemic, although it’s very clear that an infectious disease far deadlier than COVID-19 will hit us in the next generation or two. If death—proximate death, the death of parents, the future death of hundreds of millions of indisputable innocents—doesn’t change us, what will? Killer Mike and El-P don’t have the answers, but goddamn it if they don’t have a method. Killer Mike surfs waves of bubbling rage and wit (“Not a holy man, but I’m moral in my perverseness / So I support the sex workers unionizing their services”); El-P’s vulnerability is sometimes stunning (“”Well, what a wretched state of danger we’ve made here,” I thought to me / Perhaps explaining years of self lobotomy, toxically / Perhaps explaining tears and even tears in my cosmology / You numb yourself for years and it can wear upon you, honestly”); and his jagged, smoking, paranoid-android beats are in top form. Maybe we need to feel—something, anything, as long as the feeling drowns out the ads and slogans that suppress disquiet—before we can think; maybe we need to find the church of life before the obvious policy prescriptions appear obvious to us. Preach, Mike. Preach, P. 8
Run the Jewels. RTJ4. Jewel Runners/BMG, 2020. Reviewed September 7, 2024. Notable tracks: “Ju$t,” “Pulling the Pin,” “A Few Words for the Firing Squad (Radiation)” “Goonies vs. ET,” “Walking in the Snow.”