RTJ4 begins at war with the police. The titular duo—Killer Mike and El-P—work to evade a swarming force of militant cops. They draw the mob in. They shoot back. They escape. It is a fantasy. The reality comes later.
“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. The lyric is about Eric Garner. Now it’s about George Floyd, too. That these two unjust killings occurred under tragically, uncannily similar circumstances (out in the open; with other officers standing by; with a man being suffocated to death; on camera) nearly six years apart only underscores the unending flow of racist violence in America. The state of heightened rage such violence induces is untenable and corrosive. Yet love needs fury to fight hate. Clearly none of this is lost on the pair of indie, old head, no-fucks-giving, chain-snatching, self-professed menaces to sobriety behind this project. Their boisterous new album, RTJ4, makes time for trash-talking and chin-checking amid insurrection.
RTJ are still taking it to the streets to fight a tyrannical ruling class and racist policing. But after the taxing process of making Run the Jewels 3, a vitriolic album in a race against doomsday, they’ve leveled off to a manageable degree of righteous indignation. To maintain equilibrium, the punchlines are less juvenile, too, and there’s a noticeable decrease in dick jokes. Fortified with lessons learned from their “blue” album, the duo conjures up the album closest to who they are as rappers and fans, activists and husbands, goofballs and go-getters: weary but unbroken, wary but not hopeless, eager to knuckle up.
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 sadness/Clockwork Orange madness, left the scene laughing,” Mike raps on “holy calamafuck”. But on RTJ4, the pair has settled into a nice rhythm—Mike, standing his ground, gun in tow, atop a soapbox; El, the truther following every red string across a tack board. RTJ4 re-engineers their music to its most critical components, as if extracting its essence. They scrap any dead weight to maneuver more freely, finding the balance between mischief-makers and agitators.