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Run the Jewels: RTJ4 | Review - Pitchfork
Jun 05, 2020 2 mins, 44 secs

On their fourth installment, Killer Mike and El-P are back to tune up the ruling class and the racist police state, this time streamlining the process and settling into their most natural rhythm.

“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 the house on couch and watch it on TV,” Killer Mike raps on “walking in the snow,” his voice urgent.

Their boisterous new album, RTJ4, makes time for trash-talking and chin-checking amid insurrection.

By now, at the fourth installment of this series greenlit by an Adult Swim programmer, it’d be easy for them to just punch in and deliver their mandated hour of outsized, kick-in-your-teeth braggadocio—obviously, there’s still plenty of that: “Until you rob a hypebeast you ain’t seen savage/Clockwork Orange madness, left the scene laughing,” Mike raps on “holy calamafuck”.

(One El-P assessment: “This whole world’s a shit moat filled to the brim like GitMo.”) But they are noticeably more measured, both in trying to portion out their fury more carefully and choosing their words more precisely.

He establishes his priorities on “a few words for the firing squad (radiation),” through his wife: “Friends tell her, ‘He could be another Malcolm, he could be another Martin’/She told ‘em, ‘Partner, I need a husband more than the world need another martyr.” For him, now, staying active in his community is paramount, and he raps like someone lit a fire under him.

There’s a section on “never look back” where Mike punctuates every one of El-P’s thoughts.

In one exchange, El strings out a sentence like a line of train cars, “You covet disruption, I got you covered, I’m bustin’/My brother’s a runner, he’s crushin’, it’s no discussion,” crafty in and around the corners, to which Mike adds, frankly: “People, we the pirates, the pride of this great republic/No matter what you order, muhfucka, we’re what you’re stuck with.”.

This commitment to wordplay as wisecracks birthed the characters Yankee and the Brave, an imagined buddy comedy action thriller (that may or may not actually come to fruition on the screen), and manifests on the bobbing, 2 Chainz-aided “out of sight,” the slap-happy “holy calamafuck,” and in moments when Mike compares himself to Godzilla or El has “a Vonnegut punch for your Atlas shrugs.” For two rappers in their 40s, they sound so liberated and timeless, all without a chip on their shoulder about the younger class.

Others sound like sci-fi boom-bap.

RTJ4 centers protest music less explicitly than RTJ3 did, but the moments when the album is most pronouncedly in active revolt are still when it feels most essential.

All of the surveying seems to come to a head on closer “a few words for the firing squad (radiation),” where both Mike and El rattle off personal reflections from inside a dying empire

The song builds, the rage builds, and as it draws to a close, Mike makes clear who all this is for: the do-gooders that the no-gooders abused; the truth-tellers tied to the whipping post; the strange fruit left hanging from trees—the Eric Garners; the George Floyds

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