Album Review: Run The Jewels – “RTJ2”

By: Daniel Gerichter (@ZenDonut) –

Run The Jewels’ second album, RTJ2, features an array of musical guests including: Foxygen’s Diane Coffee, Blink 182’s Travis Barker, Beyonce protégé Boots, and Rage Against the Machine’s Zach De La Rocha.

For a genre so packed with lone-wolf machismo, the best pal dynamic is at its strongest in hip-hop. From Dr. Dre and Eminem to the more recent Jay Z and Kanye West bond, some artists bring out the best in each other. For all its acrid violence and pinpointed rage, Run the Jewels’ first full-length album, RTJ2, is the premium product of hip hop’s finest collaboration – and we have their friendship to thank for that.

Run the Jewels is the pairing of Killer Mike: the dirty South’s angry-as-fuck leviathan and El-P: a conglomerate of every after-school special villain. Both will be forty next year; both have languished in ‘alternative hip hop’ for almost two decades; both are raved about by hip-hop heads and critics for every beat, mixtape and record but have always managed to fly just under the radar. RTJ2 is an all-hands on deck effort from both artists – a thorough exercise for their skillsets. This time, the mainstream is paying attention, and rightly so.

As a unit Run the Jewels are only a year old, having released their self-titled EP in 2013 to monumental acclaim. RTJ1 (as you can now call it) proved that while Mike’s war cries and El-P’s ADD-rants are excellent on their own, they become something transcendent together; intertwining their individual worldviews, doubling down on their boasts and serving it all in a crisp bed of window-shaking beats.

With RTJ2, everything is bigger, tighter, funnier, and more incendiary. El-P calls himself: “A dirty boy who comes down on the side of dissonance / I can’t even relax without sirens off in the distances.” While Killer Mike continues his lyrical bludgeoning with lines like “”We killin em for freedom cause they tortured us for boredom / and even if some good ones die fuck it the Lord’ll sort em”. These are both from one of the album’s most irresistible tracks, “Close Your Eyes (and Count to Fuck)”. It’s one of the many times on RTJ2 where both emcees’ politics and world views collide and intertwine. “Angel Dusters” breaks down drug dependency with more nuance than most hip-hop artists have in them to do. Mike laments “Kush for the pain / cause the world is dangerous / driven great men insane / killed themselves with angel dust”.

And speaking of collaborations: while Big Boi and Prince Paul helped out on the first album, RTJ2’s guest list is more diverse and substantive, ranging from Foxygen’s Diane Coffee, Blink 182’s Travis Barker, Beyonce protégé Boots, and perhaps most notably: the return of Rage Against the Machine’s Zach De La Rocha. A variety of guest verses may be nothing new in hip-hop, but RTJ2’s guests only serve to compliment.

Make no mistake, this is an album with plenty of substance. Killer Mike continues to make the case against the police, foreign wars and social injustice, although probably with more profanity than his recent CNN appearances. But ultimately, this album is a banger at heart. That means that while both have a chance to lash out against their sworn enemies, they do it with their (and your) hands in the air. El-P’s sick sense of humour produces boasts like “I’m trained in vagina whispering”. Not since the days of Public Enemy has hip-hop managed to so effortlessly walk the line between political – and dropping – science; between party politics and just a straight-up party.

Beyond earning every inch of its ascension from the underground to the mainstream; beyond its for-the-people, by-the-people production process; beyond its seamless mix of nihilism and razor-sharp social awareness; RTJ2 is simply one of the best hip-hop albums of 2014.

Essential Tracks: “Angel Duster”, “Close Your Eyes (and Count to Fuck), “Blockbuster Night Part 1”