Seated in the restaurant of an east London hotel, El-P and Killer Mike are running through recent events. The past few months, they say, have been pretty tumultuous ones in the career of Run the Jewels, packed with startling highs and lows. At one extreme, their second album, Run the Jewels 2, the result of an experiment in which the duo secluded themselves away in a rural studio in upstate New York – “Convincing Mike to spend two weeks in the woods is not the easiest thing in the world,” notes El-P – was released. It garnered acclaim even more deafening than that which greeted its predecessor, critics boggling at the dexterity with which it flipped between entertainingly foul-mouthed alpha-male braggadocio – “You can all run backwards naked through a field of dicks,” it offers at one particularly colourful juncture – and righteous political anger and unsparing self-examination. At the other extreme, groans Killer Mike, its success inspired his eldest son to announce that he had decided to pursue a career as a rapper, an event he gloomily describes as “the worst day of my life, except the time he decided to get a tongue ring to impress a girl”.
Anyone looking for evidence of Run the Jewels’ ever-growing success might consider that despite the fact they once again chose to give the album away free on their website, it still sold enough copies to reach the US top 50, not a fate that regularly befalls dense, grimy independent hip-hop releases. The tour to support the album sold out, and they played to ecstatic reviews, the audiences evidence of the breadth of their appeal. “It ain’t just one group, it ain’t just one set,” enthuses Mike. “They’re like what the first rap shows I went to looked like. I can remember being a 10-year-old kid up in the bleachers, and seeing fucking white kids and black kids together. Man, I’d never seen white kids in my fucking life. I was like: ‘There’s white kids that grew up in Madison?’ It just gives me eternal hope when I look in that audience, that as humans we can figure this shit out eventually and stop doing what we do to each other, for whatever myriad of reasons we make up.”
Still, the tour was far from without incident. They were plagued by a tour bus that kept breaking down and, most spectacularly, the duo’s trailer caught fire while they were, as El-P puts it: “The only rap group desperately trying to get into St Louis on the night of the Ferguson grand jury decision, when a lot of music acts pretty much cancelled and left.” Their performance at St Louis’s Ready Room Club went ahead, hours after the announcement that police officer Darren Wilson would not face charges after shooting an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in the St Louis suburb. It proved to be a pivotal moment. Audience-shot footage of Killer Mike addressing the audience at the start of the show – his voice breaking with emotion as he quoted Martin Luther King and talked about his fears for his children’s future, El-P beside him, “turning around every few seconds, because I couldn’t stop crying” – went viral. In its wake, Killer Mike, who had already addressed the strained relations between the police and the black community on Run the Jewels 2’s brilliant Early, has enjoyed a parallel career as a respected US media pundit, discussing Ferguson on news shows, co-authoring an op-ed piece for USA Today on the use of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials: not, perhaps, a turn of events that anyone would have predicted when Killer Mike first emerged as a guest on OutKast’s Stankonia album, where he seemed largely concerned with informing listeners about the size of his penis and offering to “drill your heifer like a Black & Decker”.
Perhaps understandably, the duo talk about the St Louis show in mystical terms. Mike suggests that “fate, serendipity, God, the universe, whatever, called for us to be there at that moment”. He hadn’t wanted to say anything onstage at all, he says, being “scared as fuck” that he would only make the situation worse, but his wife and El-P talked him into it on the tour bus. “As deep as my words moved people, if I’d not had him onstage with me I can’t promise you that I would have been strong enough to make it through in the way I did. I wouldn’t have been strong enough to resist the urge to compel people to do something bad, or approve of something violent. But that night, on that stage, a white man, the more privileged in American society, stood in solidarity, silently, stoically, quietly, staunchly, with his friend, as his friend neared physical breakdown because of the pain, and let him know: ‘I’m there.’ That’s a shining example of what I as a man should do for a woman, what I as a straight man should do for gay people, it’s what the tough kid should do to the kid who’s getting bullied around by the fuckass tough kid, you know what I mean?”
“When we were on the bus, it all felt very magical and very strange,” says El-P. “By magical, I don’t mean: ‘Oh, it’s magical, it’s wonderful.’ I mean it felt like there was a force, an energy that put us there. It just felt that way. I haven’t felt that way a lot in my life. It felt like we were there for a fucking reason. That’s what I told Mike on the bus: ‘We’ve tapped into something, we’ve been riding a wave of energy that we’ve tapped into, that we don’t even know what it is, and we’re not in control of it, and this is another part of it, this is another aspect. When you’re tapped in, there’s some darkness too, and we’re going to have to ride through that, and this is that moment.”
Their success seems all the remarkable for the fact that it’s happening 20 years into their careers – not many rappers can claim to be reaching a critical and commercial peak on the verge of turning 40. “We had that romantic idea that if we put in a lot of good work, quality work, that eventually would pay off,” El-P says. “And that’s a career path, you know: that’s an idea of philosophy. But you don’t know if it’s ever going to happen. There was no overnight with us, this is the long game, the long con, you know. We’ve finally paid up. You’re not going to find two dudes who appreciate it more.”
Indeed, before they met – when Mike asked El-P to produce his 2012 album R.A.P. Music – both had reached something of a career impasse. El-P had long been a critical darling in the world of east coast underground hip-hop. He had formed the hugely influential trio Company Flow, who released the groundbreaking 1997 album Funcrusher Plus, before “cracking under the pressure” and splitting up. His subsequent solo albums I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead and Cancer 4 Cure were suggestive of a man not in the best of shape. “They were born from fucking pain, born from darkness,” he says. “Everyone thought I was fucking crazy. ‘Why are you so angry and paranoid? Drones Over Brooklyn? What are you fucking talking about?’” He sighs. “So I had to deal with: ‘Why are you paranoid?’ And one year later, drones were being flown over Brooklyn.”
In addition, he was exhausted from “10 fucking years of running a record label” – the celebrated Definitive Jux – that had left him “100% dead broke”. “When I met Mike, I’d already decided: ‘Fuck everybody else.’ I was tired of other motherfuckers.”
Killer Mike had enjoyed an equally chequered career. His guest appearances with Outkast had led to a brief and troubled stint on a major label, “when I was that young an artist, I didn’t know that you had to hold your nuts and say: ‘I’m not doing that.’” He went on to make a series of independent albums that were acclaimed without having much commercial impact. By his own admission, he was taking too many drugs. Like El-P, some observers were startled by the increasing politicisation of his work: “I was looking like a raving lunatic, fucking standing in the middle of the woods, shouting: ‘God is coming!’ I was the guy people were pointing and laughing at.”
A lot has been made of the duo’s wildly differing backgrounds. El-P grew up in affluent Brooklyn Heights, his father worked on Wall Street and was a part-time jazz musician, and the music he made was dense and avant-garde and off-kilter. Mike grew up in Atlanta and spent time as a crack dealer, an experience detailed with agonising honesty on Run the Jewels 2’s Crown. “On that track, I was able to release a 20-year-old guilt that I’d walked around with, a burden that I didn’t know was weighing down on me until it just poured out of me at 1:30 in the morning. I helped put people who were in a vulnerable position into a worse position and that was something that I reconciled.”
Nevertheless, El-P is wary of any overemphasis of the differences between them. For one thing, he says, the music they made before they met wasn’t as dissimilar as people suggest: “I was more street than people gave me credit for, and Mike is way more lyrical and comes from a different lineage than people understand about him.” And for another, he detects something troubling at the root of it. “People have literally damn near asked us to explain to them: how is it possible that you and him are friends? We can see it in their eyes, they’re trying to beat around it, when what they really want to say is: ‘He’s black, you’re white, and you guys seem like you really actually are friends. How is that possible?’”
Still, it’s hard not to be struck by their evident closeness – the way they finish each other’s sentences, the way they constantly refer to each other as brothers or best friends. They think that the power of Run the Jewels’ albums at least partially derives from the way they record their vocals, their microphones set up facing each other in the studio (“listening to two people who are clearly in the room together is a rarity these days,” notes El-P). They say they hit it off together straightaway, bonded by a shared love of golden age hip-hop: EPMD, Public Enemy, NWA, all of whom they have been compared to, despite the fact that their music doesn’t really sound anything like them. “We’ve managed to find in each other an ignition, or an agreement on something that we love about music that comes really from our era and our influencse. There’s that intangible spirit. The thing that made us love music has been carried over into the music that we’re making, so it reminds people of that, because of its energy,” El-P says.
“When I was a kid, listening to PE, Ice Cube, Scarface, the Geto Boys, I figured that music was always going to remain rebellious and confrontational and sensitive and introspective in a very masculine way, too,” Mike says. “I thought that about my music, and then somewhere, something happened, and even though I still loved the music, I was like: I don’t fit. And our music is the music that I feel that the hip-hop I saw evolved into, and it makes me happy.”
They are bullishly confident about the future: “Run The Jewels 3, I now have faith, 100%, I don’t doubt us at all,” El-P says. Mike agrees. “I walk with a sense of: ‘I know who we are.’ I have to look at the world from the point of view of a black male. If I give up hope, you get another DC sniper. I’m in no way saying I agree with that, but if I give up hope, then I’m truly hopeless. In the past 400 years of my people, and 200 years of my country, and the past 51 years since civil rights, there’s not a lot to be hopeful for. You’ve got to wake up and refill the hope every day. This guy, the music we make in this group, it’s a big part of my cup being filled up for the next day. We’re making music, touring, making some money. Our friendship has shown me that you can surpass your own prejudices, your own inclinations to be selfish, you can surpass that for a greater thing that complies with everyone, that helps everyone, that is bigger.”
And with that, they turn their attentions to the restaurant menu. Mike is on a diet, he says, so he has to be careful what he eats. “Soda, potato chips, bread aren’t on our rider any more,” El-P says. “It’s a start. You know, we’re trying to …”
“Trying not to die,” smiles Killer Mike, finishing his sentence again.
Run The Jewels 2 is out now and available as a free download from runthejewels.net. They play the Field Day festival on 6 June and the Forum, London, on 7 June.
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