US hip-hop duo Run the Jewels built on mutual friendship
How a pair of mid-career rappers became fast friends and formed one of the world’s most popular hip-hop duos, Run the Jewels.
When he was about 12 years old, Jaime Meline was flicking through a second-hand records bin in New York City when he came across a bold red album cover that caught his eye. He didn’t know a thing about it, but he liked the look of the band name — Gang of Four — and the way the album title announced itself with an exclamation mark. When he took it home and dropped the needle on the first track of its 1979 debut, Entertainment!, his eyes and ears were blown wide open by the spiky, raw post-punk guitar tone that blasted from the speakers.
More than three decades later, as one half of one of the most popular hip-hop duos in the world today, he’d end up sampling the distinctive chord progression of Ether as the basis for a song that appears near the end of that duo’s fourth album. A fortnight ahead of its release, Meline — a rapper and producer who performs as El-P in Run the Jewels — brightens immediately when Review asks whether he’s pleased by the thought of introducing Gang of Four to a new generation of listeners.
“Oh my god, you have no idea,” he replies from his studio in upstate New York. “I’ve been plotting on sampling this song from the moment I bought that record. It’s such a f..king jam, and it’s the fulfilment of a Run the Jewels fantasy. We’ve never done that before. It’s an archetypal, classic hip-hop thing to do — to reappropriate something and use it — but it’s very risky. It’s got to be tasteful; you’ve got to do it in the right way.”
Going into the writing for RTJ4 alongside fellow rapper Michael Render, aka Killer Mike, one of the goals that Meline set for himself was to find the right track to expand the duo’s sonic palette in a different way than the usual process, which involves him writing and producing his own beats and instrumentation from scratch. He tried a few ideas before landing on Ether, which immediately felt right for the tone he was seeking to strike. The next step was to get clearance to use the song, which can be a fraught — and potentially expensive — process.
As it happens, Meline had built a friendship with the British band, particularly its bassist and vocalist, Dave Allen. “You never know how people are going to react to those things,” he says. “Some people don’t like that; some people don’t want their stuff to be used that way or sampled. But they were just so into it, and so generous.”
Named The Ground Below, Meline’s remixed version of Ether is overlaid with an explosive drumbeat and sees the pair at their playful, boastful best. “You see a future where Run the Jewels ain’t the shit / Cancel my Hitler-killing trip, turn the time machine back around a century,” he raps in its second verse.
Yet overall, RTJ4 substantially dials down the abundant humour heard on earlier releases, most notably 2016’s Run the Jewels 3. With guests including Pharrell Williams, Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme and 80-year-old soul singer Mavis Staples, its 11 tracks are more concerned with exploring themes of social injustice and inequality, as well as extending the scope of their personal storytelling in a way never heard before.
In the latter respect, one of the most impressive moments is saved for the final track, A Few Words for the Firing Squad, which eschews a consistent beat in favour of revolving around strings, horns and a tension-filled ascending chord progression.
In his first verse, Render’s lyrics range from reflecting on his grief for his mother’s death two years earlier, and how his wife responded to a suggestion from one of her friends that Render’s high-profile civil rights activism could easily result in him becoming another Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr: “She told her, ‘Partner, I need a husband more than the world need another martyr’,” he raps.
Yet a week before the album’s release, a terrible reality demanded Render’s social activism in the most urgent way when the public killing of a black man named George Floyd beneath the unrelenting knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis triggered a convulsion of protests and riots across the US. At the Atlanta mayor’s press conference broadcast on news channel WSB-TV, Render gave an extraordinary, impromptu speech that contained such furious, emotional eloquence and grace that it quickly went viral, attracting tens of millions of views on social media within days.
“I’m mad as hell,” he said. “I woke up wanting to see the world burn down yesterday because I’m tired of seeing black men die. He casually put his knee on a human being’s neck for nine minutes as he died like a zebra in the clutch of a lion’s jaw. And, we watch it like murder porn over and over again. So that’s why children are burning [the country] to the ground. They don’t know what else to do. And it is the responsibility of us to make this better, right now.”
That recent event — a white cop killing a black man — is unfortunately so commonplace in the US that a mid-album track, Walking in the Snow, could easily apply to the present moment even though it was written and recorded months ago. In its second verse, Render raps:
… and every day on the evening news they feed you fear for free
And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me
Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper “I can’t breathe”
And you sit there in your house on the couch and watch it on TV
The most you give’s a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy
But truly the travesty you’ve been robbed of your empathy...
It is eerily fitting, too, that the final verse on RTJ4 belongs to Render, and its eight lines are as gripping and moving as you’ll hear anywhere else in hip-hop this year. A Few Words for the Firing Squad culminates in vivid, emotive imagery that references Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday’s classic protest song against the lynching of black Americans.
“That one had to really be about what we were saying in the lyrics, more so than just a beat that was making you nod your head,” says Meline of the album closer. “It’s something that naturally built: I had this sound bed, essentially, with all these strings and I always thought I was going to eventually add a drum beat into it. But we did what we did, and it felt so powerful that by the end of it, I had almost just forgotten. I don’t even hear that [lack of a beat] any more: I just hear what it is, and it feels beautiful.”
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The two aforementioned songs offer a window into the wide emotional spectrum that Run the Jewels has explored in its music since Meline and Render formed the duo nearly a decade ago, after being introduced by a Cartoon Network executive and becoming fast friends and collaborators. Prior to the release of their self-titled debut in 2013, Meline worked as a producer on Render’s solo album, R.A.P. Music, and Render returned the favour by appearing as a guest vocalist on Meline’s 2012 solo release, Cancer 4 Cure.
After realising they were stronger together than apart, they paired up under a name taken from the lyrics of a 1990 song by rapper LL Cool J and came up with a counterpart hand gesture of a clenched fist pointing at a pistol, which has since appeared widely across popular culture, including in comic books and in video games.
“This is our fourth album, but we had entire careers before this,” says Meline, 45, who is a month older than his bandmate. “We had a lot of time to explore our own careers and do different things, but Run the Jewels is like a kid now who’s just about to enter into the first grade. There’s always a clean palette; there’s fresh stuff to do, and that’s one of the reasons why I keep coming back, because it’s still exciting to me.”
Since 2013, the pair have toured regularly, including several visits to Australia, the last of which was around Falls Festival at the end of 2017. Before COVID-19 ruining everything, they were set to support the reactivated activist rock act Rage Against the Machine on a world tour; those dates have been rescheduled for next year, and perhaps that remarkable pairing eventually will make its way to Australia, too. But none of it works without a mutual sense of deep respect shared by the pair that’s captured in the following exchange.
“Run the Jewels is because of our friendship; our friendship is not because of Run the Jewels,” says Render, who joined the conference call from his home in Atlanta, Georgia. “Part of the first priority for me is to make sure that me and my friends always love each other and express that. We went through some difficult times early on in making this record; once we figured it out, and we got the problem fixed, we were able to reset and give you the album of our lifetimes.”
“I think also, if the friendship is real — if the love is real, if the family is real — then you already know how you want it to turn out,” says Meline. “We know that everyone’s on the same page. You know that you want it to work; you know that in your heart, no matter whatever strains or stresses come with the gig, everybody would rather this shit work than not. It’s because that real friendship is there that I think we fight through the tough parts.”
RTJ4 is out now via Jewel Runners/BMG.
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