Album Review: Run The Jewels – “Meow The Jewels”

By: Daniel Gerichter (@ZenDonut) –

To make some noise prior to the release of their 2014 barnburner RTJ2, Run the Jewels, hip-hop’s feel-good story of the decade, created a massive crowdfunding effort. The effort included everything from the obvious: $100 gets you the vinyl, CD and a t-shirt, to the cartoonish. For several million dollars, Run the Jewels would buy a van, drive it to your house and drive you around eating take-out, smoking weed and “solving mysteries”.

Somewhere between those two was Meow the Jewels. For $40K, the duo would remix all of RTJ2 replacing the existing samples with cat sounds. You know, because the internet loves and worships cats the way American conservatives worship Ronald Reagan. Taking them at their word, the internet abided and injected almost $70K into the project.

And because EL-P and Killer Mike don’t do half-ass, Meow the Jewels is so much more than just the same album with a bunch of cat sounds. That’s not to say it’s subtle, though. Everything on Meow the Jewels is redrawn as a feline equivalent. Song titles are changed to include words like ‘meow’, ‘purr’ and ‘paw’ – just in case you needed the point driven home. Instead of doing the deed themselves, the duo turned to superstar producers from all over the world, giving each a track to bat their paws at. Legendary DJ Prince Paul (De La Soul, MC Lyte and Boogie Down Productions) takes on “Lie, Cheat, Steal” with “Lie, Cheat, Meow”. Superstar producer Just Blaze (Jay-Z, Eminem, Mariah Carey) mutates “Jeopardy” into “Meowpardy”, adding Snoop Dogg and celebrity LOLcat Li’l Bub into the equation. The song even creates its own backstory, accusing EL-P of drugging Blaze into believing he’s possessed by cats.

But RTJ2’s success wasn’t a coincidence. It’s actually hinged on two things:

1) ferocious beats and boasts like any great party album

2) a cultural awareness pointedly never found on a party album.

To take either of those things away is to (at least partially) deflate it, so when it comes to songs like “Early” (transformed into “Meowrly”), a song about police brutality, the meows go away, and purrs and scratching create a new sort of tension. These things by no means accentuate the song’s meaning, but in this case, vocalist and guest-producer Boots does his best not to utterly squash it. Ditto for Dan the Automater’s take on “Angel Duster” (“Angelsnuggler), Portishead maven Geoff Barrow’s take on banger “Close your Eyes (and Count to Fuck)” (“Close your Eyes and Meow to Fluff”) and Massive Attack’s 3D on “Crown” (“Creown”).

So should you listen to Meow the Jewels? Put it like this: it’s the type of thing only Run the Jewels could have pulled off. Imagine being a fly on the wall when they approached Portishead or Massive Attack members with the idea. That they dove into this project so emphatically says that the idea has legs (paws) beyond its initial novelty. Everyone on the album approached it with as much nuance as possible (given the circumstances) and produced something that’s significantly better than anyone could have expected. Is it good? Definitely! Is it better than RTJ2? Why would you even ask that? Meow the Jewels is a jovial revisiting of one of the best hip-hop albums of the last decade and a substantial distraction while we wait for RTJ3. That it isn’t a complete disaster is kind of a meowracle.