Run the Jewels (2013)

Here's yet another example of my most favouritest favourite thing ever for which I somehow failed to get the memo. Specifically I've still been thinking of El-P as the guy from Company Flow and was somehow unaware of the existence of Run the Jewels - now on their fourth fucking album - until a little over a year ago. It's because I'm old and I dislike the internet, music radio, streaming, kids kicking a football against my fence, and most rap magazines seem to be a complete waste of time these days, from what I can tell.

Run the Jewels came as quite a shock when I first heard them, and it's taken me a couple of days to acclimate, having finally bought myself a copy of this, their first album. The production couldn't really be the work of anyone but El-P, and yet the beats, the rhythms, the rapping border on trap music, albeit a more lyrical version; and by trap I mean the slow, low rider bass and hi-hat jittering along like some tweaker with rapid fire lines delivered over the top. It's a long, long way from El-P's roots in semi-abstract agit-prop over a chugging rhythm that always reminded me of Nocturnal Emissions; but on the other hand, he's always been eclectic, always tried new things, and I seem to recall him hanging out with Dizzee Rascal for a while. As an artist who wouldn't want to be a part of any club that would have him, I imagine he got tired of the indie ghetto, the inverted snobbery of the underground; and even with Run the Jewels being the success it has been, if the sound seems less startling on the same playlist as Lil' Yachty, the material is still thematically uncompromising, even if there's nothing quite so hard and harrowing as Patriotism, or Habeas Corpses or For My Upstairs Neighbour.

The more I listen, the more I appreciate the contrast with and contribution from Killer Mike; and the more I recognise the qualities which have rendered the work of El-P so distinctive, so essential: the grinding b-movie synth, the friction and dirt, the paradoxically epic scale invoked in combinations of broken noises, the arrestingly weird images ingeniously wrapped up in unfamiliar rhyme schemes, particularly on Sea Legs.

Trying not to walk crooked while this anchor's dropped,
But I've been out on them choppy waves,
And it's hard to say,
Where this land begins,
And that water stops.

I still don't know what any of it's about beyond that it's taking no prisoners and this time around the shout outs go to Ice Cube and Spice 1 - which is something I never thought I'd hear - and they clearly had a blast making it.

Still boldly going where no man etc. etc.